Overwriting (6): Misogynism - Why Women Were Exluded From the Christian Ministry

[Rebbe]

FUNDAMENTALS: THE OVERWRITING OF THE NT CORPUS [6]

MISOGYNISM --  HOW THE CHANGING OF A NAME HELPED EXCLUDE WOMEN FROM THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY
 
Copyright © BRI 2014 All Rights Reserved Worldwide by Les Aron Gosling,
Messianic Lecturer (BRI/IMCF)

CAUTION: BRI Yeshiva notes are not available to the general public. They are not for distribution. They are not for reproduction. The notes may also bear little or no resemblance to the actual audio or video recorded BRI Yeshiva lecture.

In my lecture today I wish to overturn two problematic issues that at first seem to have no connection with each other but which, indeed, are related very intimately. One issue has to do with the death of Mashiach (how he actually died) and the other with the role of women in the world and in the ekklesia. You will, hopefully, see how related these two biblical questions are as we progress.

There are many preachers today who insist that Christ died of a broken heart -- a broken heart at being rejected by those he came to save. This is what I would call the over-sentimentalism of the Gospel.

"The Mashiach died for our sins," wrote Paul, "according to the Scriptures" (1 Cor 15.3). The Scripture speaks of lost humankind as slaves to sin. Human beings are owned by sin and bound by sin. It took the precious shed blood of Christ to deliver the firstfruits of humankind from the power of the Dark Lord. While the death of the Messiah justified the entire world (for all were dead in sins) only those predetermined by God the Father to respond in this age have responded, and have been delivered. The Bible says, we have been delivered at this time -- WE (the firstfruits of the harvest) and not the whole world. In contrast to the "firstfruits," "the whole world lies in wickedness," wrote John (1 Jn 5.19). At our conversion, God the Father "delivered US from the power of darkness" (Col 1.13). The world yet awaits its deliverance.

Whether any of us realise it or not we all had an intimate relationship with the Dark Lord -- but we have been released from that relationship we once had with haSatan. Our work in this present evil age is to reach the Firstfruits, the predetermined, the "called of God," the "elect" -- the HOLY SPARKS of God -- and to draw them into a working relationship with the Lord Yeshua our elder brother. We have a commission from Heaven to "open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God" (Acts 26.18).

We stand redeemed.

The blind composer Fanny Crosby gave a testimony of the saved believer.

"Redeemed, redeemed!
Redeemed by the blood of the Lamb.
Redeemed, redeemed,
His child, and forever, I am."

Redemption is actually a slave-market word. It means that a slave has been purchased by the cost of another, a freeman. No slave ever purchased his or her own freedom. That cost was always and ever borne by Another. Our Lord Yeshua paid the extreme price of redemption, to free you and me. We have been redeemed, purchased, by "the precious blood of the Messiah, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot" (1 Pet 1.19). Our redemption is by Messiah alone.

Paul again informs us that we have been "justified freely by His Grace through the redemption that is in Mashiach Yeshua" (Rom 3.24).

He repeats this in Eph 1.7: "In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His Grace."

Without the death of Yeshua the Messiah none of us would ever be saved. No Christian, no Jew, no Jain, no Moslem, no Buddhist, no atheist, no agnostic -- nobody. So the death of Christ is paramount to our being given, Graciously, salvation.

Yet in so many versions of the Bible the one text which explains so much about the death of the Messiah has been left out of the biblical revelation! Once again, on such an important aspect of the biblical revelation, we find an example of the tampering with Holy Writ by the muck-covered fingers of the Devil.

Turn with me to Matthew's Gospel. Consider Mt 27.46-50. In most versions this passage reads something like, "Now from the sixth hour until the ninth hour there was darkness over all the land. And about the ninth hour Yeshua cried out with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Some of those who stood there, when they heard that, said, This man is calling for Elijah! Immediately one of them ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed, and offered it to him to drink. The rest said, Let him alone; let us see if Elijah will come to save him. And Yeshua cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit."

But this is not the entire verse! Left out of the text are the crucial words "And another took a spear and thrust it into his side and out came water and blood." These words ought to be placed immediately after "save him" and before "And Yeshua cried out."

The ancient mss for the most part include it, namely Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, Ephraemi, the Ethiopic and bulk of the Syrian translations and a host of others. The great scholar Origen refers to it. Modern biblicists such as Moffatt and Fenton include it. Why then is it not included in modern versions and translations? After all, we must ask the question for no other reason than it tells us precisely how Mashiach died.

Ecclesiastical history informs us that a forged copy of Matthew's Gospel was discovered in Cyprus at the time of emperor Zeno (circa 477 CE) when the archbishop Anthemios was told in a dream of the location of a cave in which Barnabas, an early Christian associate of Paul, had been interred. Barnabas had come from Cyprus. After an uncomplicated search, the remains of the apostle were unearthed along with the Matthean Gospel which was supposed to have been penned by Barnabas. The bones and the Gospel were then presented to the emperor. The text did not include the full verse of Matthew 27.49. There are a number of scholars who proffer that this false Gospel was planted in order to support the political independence of Cyprus. They may of course be correct.

As a consequence of the religious authorities of the time accepting this fraudulent document at face value, the extant Gospel of Matthew (and some other NT works) was censored in 511 CE. The lost text still appeared as a marginal reading in some of the later Greek mss which were examined by the KJV revisionists -- but ignored.

Notice now, once the text is included in Matthew's account, how it dovetails with John's assessment that Yeshua had been killed by the spear (or, short sword) thrust.

"So when Yeshua had received the sour wine, he said, It is finished! And bowing his head, he gave up his spirit. Therefore, because it was the Preparation Day, that the bodies should not remain on the cross [Gk., stauros] on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a high day), the Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away. Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who was crucified with him. But when they came to Yeshua and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers HAD pierced his side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out" (Jn 19.30-34 Greek).

"Pierced" is in the aorist tense which describes an action but fails to inform us of WHEN that action had taken place. It is ever, only and always the context (or other ms comparisons) that can make such a time of eventuating clear to the reader. From the lost section of Mt 29.47 we know now that the spear (or short sword) thrust had terminated the life of the Messiah as he hung in strangling agony, his flesh ripped to shreds.

There have been suggestions that the order of the original text of John has been interfered with, and those who make such an assessment may well be correct. If they are correct, the text would read as follows:

"(30a) So when Yeshua had received the sour wine, he said, It is finished! (34) One of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out. (30b) His head fell forward and he expired. (31) Therefore, because it was the Preparation Day, that the bodies should not remain on the cross on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a high day), the Jews urged Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away. (32) Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who was crucified with him. (33) But when they came to Yeshua and noted that he was already dead, they did not break his legs."

A corpse will not bleed. Once we place the Matthean verse back into the text where it properly belongs we eradicate any necessity by enthusiastic Christians with convoluted arguments espousing in their books explanations on precisely how water and blood came out of his body AFTER Yeshua had already died. It also dismisses the maggots who come out of the woodwork every Easter to explain that the expiring of the Saviour was really "a swoon" and that he was not in fact dead at the time which can easily be ascertained (say they) by the evidence of water and blood flowing AFTER his supposed death.

Listen! Yeshua's bloody, horrific death on the tree of Golgoleth entirely satisfied God the Father's demands for all our sins, past, present and future. His death and resurrection have granted all who believe in Him some wonderful promises and expectations.

How much did God the Father love us? Isaiah tells us in the original Hebrew that "the stroke of the Lord was upon him" (Isa 53.4) -- that spear thrust was directed by the Lord Himself! "No man takes my life from me" said Yeshua. "I lay it down of my own accord" (Jn 10.18). The Tetragrammaton directed the Roman to thrust that sword into Its side and to impale Itself upon it. He did it for you and for me.

Now, it may have appeared to some of my students that I have been heading in a direction in this lecture other than what is about to be espoused. Well, I saw opportunity to "kill two birds with one stone" as it were. After all, a balanced perception of the death of Christ is vital to an appreciative grasp of what that death produced for humanity. Spoil the good news about the details of Christ's death and we spoil the outcome by not elevating the truth of what that death accomplished.

Its a spiritual dynamic that is at work here; the reason we have a male-dominated evil at work in the historic church and the revitalised Messianic ekklesias is the natural outgrowth of a distortion of the physical reason why Yeshua actually died. It's about a sword that pierces our very Being, just as it did the side of Yeshua 2000 long years ago (Zech 12.10; Rev 1.7), and which also pierced his Mother's heart (Lk 2.33,34).

"Behold this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted -- And you yourself a sword will pierce -- so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed" (Simeon to Miriam).

With each occasion of a woman denied her fundamental right (won by Yeshua) relating to EQUALITY with a man, then that sword plunges into the side of Yeshua not just once again, but brutally and repeatedly.

What is the Messianic Community? What is the "Church" (ekklesia)? It is nothing if it is not a spiritual woman in her role as priestess, delivering the Gospel to the unsaved and the lost of this world. And if a woman (and all through the Scripture the people of God are classified as feminine) then why does a male-dominated universal church deny women the right to act as their Holy Mother Church acts in Her role as the Channel for the Sh'khinah of the Lord of Heaven? Why are women severed from ministry even within the ekklesia?

Listen! As Eve was surgically severed from the side of the First Adam, so also the "Church" (if we are compelled to use the word) has been created from the pierced side of the Last Adam. Yeshua is called the "Last Adam," remember (1 Cor 15.45). He is the last Adam, not the second Adam -- and if you have "second Adam" in your Bible then change it because it's yet another gross mistranslation. If there was a second Adam it leaves the door open for a third, fourth and even fifth Adam or more. By being merely the second Adam Christ has failed to accomplish being the "All in All," for he is the visible image of the Invisible One we call Father. The Messianic Community has its origins in the blood and water which flowed from Yeshua's side from the death thrust of a spear. That death thrust gave birth to the blood and water upon which John constructed an entire theology. We are washed in the blood of the Passover Lamb and we are cleansed by the water of the Word made flesh. Whichever way we want to cut it, the bottom line is that the Messianic Community is the New Eve, the daughter of heaven, the Bride of Mashiach, the Matronit, Our Lady of Faith.

The great Catholic theologian Karl Rahner suggested that all who hear the prophecy of Simeon in Luke's Gospel should readily identify with Mary (Miriam) in her agony of spirit seeing her life as a pattern for their own. To my mind, this is a profound recognition of the universal Christian "sameness" of all who believe in the depths of their converted hearts that they both love the Messianic Pretender (in the right use of this word) as well as loving his devoted Mother. The piercing sword is the way of faith and like a sword that faith pierces and divides as it penetrates right into the depths of the believer's heart. As Rahner would put it, "Faith is the enduring of this sword."

One Christian writer has mused, "Faith is the readiness to live on in hope when conflict threatens and allows us to entrust ourselves unconditionally to God. It is faith [that] when we accept the blow of the sword in our existence, the sword of the question that finds no answer; the sword that all life in pain ends in death; the sword that not even love dissolves all contradictions in this life; the sword of the leave-takings, disappointments, sickness and isolation. All these swords pierce our hearts but in this piercing and in the pain we become more open to the mystery of healing and caring and mercy who is God... According to the author of Revelation (1:16), the two-edged sword goes forth from the Son of God, who was himself pierced in his dying for our sins... If [the Son of Humankind] is the pierced one and if Mary, in faith, also surrendered to be pierced by the sword, then our faith demands that we be similarly surrendered to the suffering, rejection, contradiction and struggle of believing in [the Son of Humankind] and living as his disciples in the world. Only a fool or a masochist would surrender himself/herself to suffering for its own sake, but it requires the foolishness of a believer to accept suffering as an inevitable by-product of discipleship. Those who do so, for the sake of Christ and the gospel, become healers, as it were, who can reveal the fullest meaning of life to others."

How can any Christian believer not accept such an evaluation?

One of those wonderful gifts of Grace which his death also accomplished has been often overlooked. It is something concerning which most Christians are blissfully unaware. His death abolished the curse of female subordination to men.

Yet, due to further manipulations of the sacred text, this truth has all but been lost.

I have stated many times that if we cannot get the story of the Garden of Eden right, we get nothing else right about the biblical revelation. That's why the account of Eden is right at the start of the Bible. Its that vital to grasp.

In Gen 3.16, God revealed to Eve that her transgression had brought about consequences neither she or her husband actually wanted in reality. "Your desire will be for your husband, and [as a result] he will rule over you."

Some confuse this "desire" as sexual. But the Hebrew does not allow for such a conclusion. Rather the little word "for" (as in "Your desire will be for your husband") can mean, and probably does mean, "to usurp" or "to control," and how many women even today desire to usurp not merely the more masculine roles of their partner, but their very character?

We all know wives (or, know of wives) who never cease to tear down their husband in the eyes of other women and even their husband's male colleagues (be they fellow businessmen, office-workers, or neighbours). To run-down a husband is the diametric opposite of assisting and supporting him. There are women who are deeply driven to accomplish this de-masculinisation (or, emotional castration) process. They are not happy until their negative actions to control their husband have either crippled him or sent him to the brink of filing for divorce or even worse, plotting to murder his spouse. (Watched the C.I. cable channel lately?) Bottom line is that we are here discussing an ongoing discordant power struggle between the sexes. That is what the curse of Eden is all about. And it is a curse which Yeshua has reversed. Wrong teaching however, has perpetuated this denial of the righteousness which has been awarded to each of us, as male and female, as a result of the death the Mashiach accomplished.

Originally, it was the Ideal intention of God that the man (Adam) and the woman (Eve) would exist in a relationship of loving co-dependency. They would be, in other words, interdependent. But the Dark Lord came along and the future went in another direction than that which God ideally wanted. (Of course, we all realise that Eden actually went "right" in the plan of God. Otherwise Christ would never have been a "Saviour from eternity" as the biblical revelation makes patently clear.)

Incidentally, that curse which has its foundation in Eden, was one of the reasons ancient Israel was eventually toppled and fell before the Assyrian conquests of the 8th century BCE. Isaiah had testified that "children [are] their oppressors and women rule over them" (Isa 3.12). He was, in fact, prophetically speaking also of our day today.

The good news is that equality between men and women came about as a consequence of the death of the Messiah. But, and let me state this categorically, in the NT Codex we find a progressive understanding gradually dawning in the minds of the NT authors of what God did through the cross of Christ in reference to women. It is this principle of divine progressive revelation which helps to explain the difficulties existing in the Gospels when it comes to socially-conditioned issues about women (especially Mark, Matthew and, to an extent, in Luke) and the early Pauline compositions when contrasted with his later letters when he deals with husbands and wives in co-equal partnership (Eph 5 as a prime example). Men and women need to surrender to each other, and to submit to one another (without reservation) if they are husband and wife "out of a deep and passionate reverence for the Messiah" (Eph 5.21).

Paul informs his readers in an early letter that "it is good for a man not to touch a woman" (1 Cor 7.1) and from our research it appears that Paul was once married and had the attitude of "once bitten, twice shy" or he might have held the Orthodox Talmudic rabbinic view which prevails even today about not being touched by a female (although this tradition -- again, as we have it today -- had a much later evolution in eastern European Jewish/Gentile social and cultural conflicts). Whatever the case, Paul was in his early days extremely rigid when it came to relationships with the opposite sex. But in his later, more mature expressions of a deeper spirituality (again, his epistle to the Ephesians 5 leaps immediately to mind) Paul stresses equality and mutual submission between a husband and a wife. Husbands were to love and serve their wives sacrificially and unconditionally just as Yeshua the Mashiach loved and served His ekklesia sacrificially and unconditionally. There can be absolutely no doubt at all that Paul's earlier teachings were subject to progressive revelation. The more he thought about the ramifications of the death of the Messiah the more he grew into a working knowledge of the Ideal which God the Father desired from the creation itself. In Mashiach Paul envisioned a New Creation denominated by a New Creativity between the sexes. In fact he set about reversing previously accepted cultural values and social codes from within the Messianic congregations of God themselves. And opposition to Paul (it would appear on this subject) quickly mounted from representatives of the Jamesian Party from within the Christian ranks.

Women were the first to announce the resurrection of Christ as the four Gospels reiterate. Yeshua showed himself to his devoted disciple Miriam Magdalit shortly after his rose from the dead and prior to his entry into heaven that same day. "Touch me not Miriam! I have not yet ascended to the Father." Yet, our early Paul never mentions Yeshua's first appearances to women because women were not occasioned an authenticity to be witnesses of important, let alone major, events (1 Cor 15.1-8). Later, as Paul became more balanced by the feminine Spirit of God, he surrounded himself with women as equal apostles with him in his commission to reach "the Jews first and also the Gentiles." An apostle was one who had the credentials of actually SEEING the resurrected Lord (1 Cor 9.1).

"Am I not an apostle? Am I not free? Have I not seen Yeshua the Messiah, my Lord? Are you not my work in the Lord?"

Paul worked closely with women who had seen the living Christ! And he called them apostles. Unfortunately, for almost 1900 years men have worked relentlessly to avoid that fact because they wanted a male-dominated hierarchy of eldership and their subterfuge worked well indeed. Women who sought a sacrificial, serving position in the church were over-ruled with force of argument (using false and overwritten texts) and their worth and their work discredited. Rome led the way in this regard, and today's Catholic church has also led the way in child molestations and child abuse and the rape of little children by men wearing dresses! How utterly perverse is that!

According to the written Word of God, Paul referred to a very influential Prisca and her husband Aquila as "fellow labourers" with him of the Gospel (Acts 18.2,18,26; Rom 16.3; 1 Cor 16.19). Intriguingly, in Rom 16.3 Paul does an extremely strange thing considering the times in which he lived. He mentions Aquila's wife first, then Aquila! They are mentioned on seven occasions in the NT and five of those times it is Prisca who is mentioned first -- leading that of her husband (Ac 18.18,19,26; Rom 16.3; 2 Tim 4.19). Paul grants to this woman a respect unheard of in the Roman-Jewish world. Phoebe is also mentioned in Rom 16.1,2. She is a deacon. She is also commended by the Jewish rabbi. If we read the NT writings correctly we find that deacons have the authority to teach and to preach.

Paul also refers to a conflict in an assembly going on between two of his co-workers (apostles) namely Euodia and Syntyche (Phil 4.1-3). He urges others to intervene for both these women who laboured faithfully with him in the Gospel (Phil 4.3). In Rom 16.5-16 another 25 Christians are mentioned and seven of these are considered prominent females. Paul may well have been sexist like every one else in his early career as an apostle (and the evidence is insistent in this regard) but by the time he matured in his creative theological thinking Paul like Yeshua before him elevated women to a high degree, indeed placing them on a virtual pedestal in defiance of the cultural and social edicts of his day and age.

But now cast your studious glance at Rom 16.7 and ask the obvious question as to why the Latin translators (and others: see, sadly, The Translator's New Testament; Living New Testament; Amplified; Darby's New Translation; New English Bible; Moffatt; J.B. Phillip's New Testament in Modern English; Revised Standard Version; Concordant Version; New International Version; Jay Adam's The Christian Counselor's New Testament; Jay Green's The Interlinear Bible; Fenton's Holy Bible in Modern English; Schonfield's The Original New Testament; Rotherham's The Emphasized Bible; New American Standard Version and the Jehovah Witnesses's Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures and the list goes on) have consistently renamed Junia (feminine) as Junias (masculine)?

Junia was an apostle with a strong reputation among the brethren and she was a believer and (apparently) an evangelist PRIOR to Paul's conversion! That is what the record states from the mouth of Paul himself. Even the anti-Semite Chrystostom (d.407 CE) spoke of Junia as a woman (Homily on Romans, Nicene & Post Nicene Fathers 1, 11.555). But it was the castrated Origen, who despised women, who postulated the opposite. Ever since, erudite Christian scholars -- who want Paul's early understanding of the role of women in the Christian community to relate cohesively with that which he wrote much later in his life and ministry -- argue amongst themselves as to the sexual identity of this character Junia! There are translations available today which prefer to make this woman a man, Junias. They do not want to see equality and freedom extended to the fairer sex. In Australia women still do not have equal opportunity in employment or equal wages -- even if they are doing the work of a man and accomplishing that same work in a far better way and getting better results!

The vast overwhelming majority of ancient Greek mss give the apostle's name as Junia (feminine). Changing Junia to Junias was a sleight of hand by Catholic priests (see the Latin Vulgate; Knox translation; Douay; Rheims; The Jerusalem Bible and Pope Leo XIII's Encyclical on the Study of the Holy Scriptures on Rom 16.7) in order to outlaw finally all women who desired a salvific work in Messiah Yeshua in outreach to others. It's high time we put her back where she once (and rightly) belonged. And, especially as Passover approaches, to recall what it was that actually killed the Mashiach who died for our sins and (as a consequence) reversed the curse that placed women inordinately beneath men and brought about an equality of sexes within the ekklesia which cannot be spoken against.

"For there is neither male or female... for you are all ONE in Messiah Yeshua" (Gal 3.28).