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Jesus Was a Feminist What the Gospels Reveal about His Revolutionary Perspective Leonard Swidler 9781580512183 Books

Download As PDF : Jesus Was a Feminist What the Gospels Reveal about His Revolutionary Perspective Leonard Swidler 9781580512183 Books

Jesus Was a Feminist What the Gospels Reveal about His Revolutionary Perspective Leonard Swidler 9781580512183 Books

Leonard Swidler is professor of Catholic thought and interreligious dialogue at Temple University; he has written many other books, such as Biblical Affirmations of Woman,Yeshua: A Model for Moderns,The Study of Religion in an Age of Global Dialogue,Trialogue: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Dialogue,Buddhism Made Plain: An Introduction for Christians and Jews,Dialogue for Interreligious Understanding: Strategies for the Transformation of Culture-Shaping Institutions,For All Life: Toward a Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic,Women priests: A Catholic Commentary on the Vatican Declaration, etc.

In the opening section of this 2007 book, he explains, “To save the reader the bother of having to look at the back of the book for the answer, let me say up front in very brief fashion the most dramatic conclusions I come to here in this volume after many decades of research and reflection. The first one it… that Jesus was a feminist---and that presumably his followers should imitate him in that… The second dramatic conclusion that I draw is that Jesus… did NOT reject divorce and remarriage! The third is that proto versions of two of the canonical Gospels, namely, Luke’s and the Fourth Gospel, were written by women… The fourth, and most sweeping, conclusion is that we would not have Christianity today if all the materials on Jesus’ teaching and life that were gathered and handed on by women were missing… doubtless some kind of religion around Jesus would have grown up. However, it would have been rather anemic, and doubtless would have faded from all but human memory… The proof for these claims? For that you will have to read the book.”

He wrote in the first chapter, “This book grew out of an article that was published in the January 1971 issue of the ‘Catholic World’ titled ‘Jesus Was a Feminist.’ The article in turn grew out of an undergraduate course I offered in the fall of 1970 at Temple University… called ‘Women and Religion.’ I had become a conscious feminist after I saw my wife… being constantly slighted in the academic world simply because she was a woman… I set about preparing for the fall 1970 course, but when I came to Christianity, I could not find any books on the attitude of Jesus toward women… I could find only a paragraph or two in a few books. So… I sat down with the only primary materials that dealt with Jesus, the four Gospels, and carefully went through them, taking notes on every scrap that in any way related to women.

“The first difference between the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament I noticed is the attitude toward women. There is not only a large amount of evidence of a positive attitude by Jesus toward women exhibited in the Gospels, there is also a complete lack of any evidence of a negative attitude toward women by Jesus. The same could not, of course, be said of the followers of Jesus in the rest of the New Testament… The result of looking through the Gospels was astonishingly clear and abundant---Jesus was a feminist!... When it was published… It was reproduced dozens and dozens of times… I still encounter women who tell me how important that article was in their lives… I thought it would, nevertheless, be helpful to pull together all the material that I had gathered in the past forty years on Jesus… and offer a more full-blown presentation of the evidence that Jesus was indeed a feminist.” (Pg. 1-2)

He explains, “the early church quickly became not only anti-feminist, but anti-woman… The misogynist slide continued after the New Testament… In the Jewish culture women were held to be… ‘in all things inferior to man.’ Since it was out of that milieu that the evangelists were writing… neither of them could have been the source of the feminism found in the Yeshua of the Gospels. Its only possible source was Yeshua himself… there is every likelihood that the strong feminism of Yeshua has been muted in the Gospels… In the case of women, as in that of other marginalized groups, Yeshua raised a powerful voice of protest… after the first enthusiastic response of women followers to this liberating feminist move by Yeshua, the Christian Church quickly sank back into a non-feminist, even misogynist, morass until our time.” (Pg. 21-22)

He points out, “Moreover, women became disciples of Yeshua … also in the sense of following him in his travels and ministering to him… Within this context of women being disciples and ministers, Yeshua quite deliberately broke another custom disadvantageous to women… Yeshua’s first appearance after his resurrection to any of his followers was to a woman (or women), who was then commissioned by him to bear witness of the risen Yeshua to the Eleven.” (Pg. 23)

He notes, “Perhaps the strongest and clearest affirmation on the part of Yeshua that the intellectual and ‘spiritual’ life was just as proper to women as to men is recorded in Luke’s Gospel [Lk 10:38-42] in the description of a visit to Yeshua to the house of his friends Martha and Mary… Yeshua here clearly rejected the prevalent notion that the only proper place for women was ‘in the home.’ … It is difficult to imagine how Yeshua could possibly have been clearer in his insistence that women were called to the intellectual, the spiritual life just as men.” (Pg. 30-31)

After quoting Luke 11:28 [‘Blessed is the womb that bore you…’], he suggests, “It is difficult to see how the primary point of this text could be anything substantially other than this. Luke and the sources he depended on (I argue below that he depended on a Proto-Luke Gospel written by an unknown woman, whom I, for convenience, name Luka) must also have been quite clear about the sexual significance of this event.” (Pg. 32)

He observes, “the positive images of women that Yeshua employed were often very exalted, at times being associated with the Reign of Heaven, likened to chosen people, and even to God herself!... Yeshua strove in many ways to communicate the notion of the equal dignity of women, and in one sense that effort was capped by his parable of the woman who found the lost coin [Lk 15:8-10]: here Yeshua projected God in the image of a woman… it should be clear that Yeshua vigorously promoted the dignity and equality of women in the midst of a very male-dominated society. Yeshua was a feminist, and a very radical one.” (Pg. 33) Later, he adds, “Yeshua did not shrink from applying a female image to himself either; he likened himself [Lk 13:34] to a hen gathering her chicks under her wings.” (Pg. 54)

He states, “The disciples of Yeshua were those who followed Yeshua about, listening to and living with him. This group of disciples included, in a prominent way, a number of women (some are specifically named), mainly from the more rural area of Galilee where the restrictive rules against women were less stringent than in Jerusalem. Still, they had to leave home and family and travel with a ‘rabbi,’ an unheard-of breach of custom. What is also astonishing is that these three named women, Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna, and others unnamed, PAID FOR the support of Yeshua and his other followers.” [Lk 8:3] (Pg. 73) He adds, “All three of the Synoptic Gospels use a form of the verb ‘diakoneo’ (to minister or serve) to describe what these women did in addition to saying that they ‘followed’ Yeshua. It is the same basic word as ‘deacon’; indeed, apparently the tasks of the deacons in early Christianity were much the same as those these women undertook.” (Pg. 74)

He argues, “[The Greek version of] Matthew strongly communicated a pro-woman message in his very structuring of the events and discourses of Yeshua, of course not found in the Aramaic Matthew… a movement of an ever-sharper focus on women in Yeshua’s life and gospel becomes at least dimly visible.” (Pg. 135) Later, he adds, “Of the forty-two passages in Luke dealing with women in the feminine, over half… are special to Luke… Here is further indication that Luke was most especially open to women in the writing of the Gospel… Vincent Taylor and Burnett Hillman Streeter were the main initiators of the likelihood of the existence of a Proto-Gospel within Luke… What clearly is very easy to sustain as a step toward claiming a woman writer of Luke’s Proto-Gospel is that one or more women disciples were responsible for the remembrance and handing on, either in oral or written form, of at least those passages which pertain in a special way to women… These women… would have been the ones to remember them and pass them on… Thus, even if she, or they, might not be proved the proximate ‘evangelist’ of the Proto-Gospel material of Luke, they should certainly, at the very least, be called ‘proto-evangelists’… What seems much more likely is … that a woman wrote down the Proto-Gospel, using largely the recollections of the community of women…” (Pg. 143-145) Later, he suggests, “The Beloved Disciple, and the source of the Fourth Gospel, was a woman, and the most likely candidate is Mary Magdalene.” (Pg. 171)

He concludes, “Without the women followers of Yeshua, and their remembering and recording… we would be missing half of the Gospels, and we would not have Christianity today…. Yeshua’s feminism, though it was practically the indispensable ‘incubator’ for Christianity, was quickly and largely suppressed by his second/third generation followers, down largely to today.” (Pg. 191)

While some of Swidler’s ideas seem rather speculative and lacking firm support, his presentation of the teachings of Jesus is excellent, and will be “must reading” for all students of the historical Jesus, for Christian feminists, or other Progressive Christians.


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Jesus Was a Feminist What the Gospels Reveal about His Revolutionary Perspective Leonard Swidler 9781580512183 Books Reviews

I knew I needed to read this book after reading the Jesus was a Feminist article on godswordtowomen.org. This book is an in depth analysis of the gospels including all the nuances and instances of Jesus' interactions with women. The author spends a large amount of time comparing and contrasting the gospels which can get repetitive, but I understand why it is necessary.

This book is chalk full of insights and research regarding Jesus, the gospels, the apocrypha and other exerts including Paul stance on women. Some of my favorite parts are the writings on Mary Magdeline and the complexity of her character in regards to the resurrection and her possible identity as the Beloved Disciple. I also enjoyed reading the cultural research of the early church and how it relates to women. I am very thankful Leonard Swidler wrote this book and will treasure it in my library.
Leonard Swidler, a Professor of Catholic Thought in Philadelphia presents us a feminist interpretation of Jesus. This book was appealing to me because it provided an outlook on Jesus that I had never heard before. Swidler tells us about a Jesus whom not only venerated and cared for women, but he also advocated for their rights by treating them as equals to men and involving them in his work. To validate this conclusion, Swidler divides the book in three sections; the first section of the book explores the life of women in the ancient world. He analyzes how Jesus talked to women and how he did his teachings given the context. Then, in the second section of the book, he looks at all of the major mentions of women in the four Gospels, and examines the attitude towards women the Gospel Writers reflected. Finally, in the last part he talks about the early Christians’ views of women; here he analyses the Appendixes of the New Testament and other Early Christian Writings, first to discuss the treatment of women in the New Testament, and the misogyny that dominated the other early Christian writings in the centuries that followed the era of the New Testament. I found that his book was complete, he presented his point of view and evidence from the Gospels that support it. I believe that it is a very empowering book for women, since it shines a different light on them, making primary, central and very important in Jesus’ life and teachings. In his book I was able to see a revolutionary Jesus, one who shows not only how much Jesus loved women but also how very valuable their input has been to Christianity. Page after page, I was able to see a Jesus who defended women, honored and healed them. It was a Jesus who didn’t care about the taboos of the time, and fought for women’s equality with men. Swidler explores how Jesus treated each woman with dignity, especially by giving them a voice. Swidler points out that without women’s telling and re-telling of their stories, we would wouldn’t have certain Gospels or teachings. Swidler by providing us with the social context of the time, he helps us see a more revolutionary Jesus, one who cared for women dearly and was a feminist who did more for women than we have been taught.
We need to reconsider Jesus Christ for his tradition-breaking attitudes towards women-- and follow His lead.
Leonard Swidler is professor of Catholic thought and interreligious dialogue at Temple University; he has written many other books, such as Biblical Affirmations of Woman,Yeshua A Model for Moderns,The Study of Religion in an Age of Global Dialogue,Trialogue Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Dialogue,Buddhism Made Plain An Introduction for Christians and Jews,Dialogue for Interreligious Understanding Strategies for the Transformation of Culture-Shaping Institutions,For All Life Toward a Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic,Women priests A Catholic Commentary on the Vatican Declaration, etc.

In the opening section of this 2007 book, he explains, “To save the reader the bother of having to look at the back of the book for the answer, let me say up front in very brief fashion the most dramatic conclusions I come to here in this volume after many decades of research and reflection. The first one it… that Jesus was a feminist---and that presumably his followers should imitate him in that… The second dramatic conclusion that I draw is that Jesus… did NOT reject divorce and remarriage! The third is that proto versions of two of the canonical Gospels, namely, Luke’s and the Fourth Gospel, were written by women… The fourth, and most sweeping, conclusion is that we would not have Christianity today if all the materials on Jesus’ teaching and life that were gathered and handed on by women were missing… doubtless some kind of religion around Jesus would have grown up. However, it would have been rather anemic, and doubtless would have faded from all but human memory… The proof for these claims? For that you will have to read the book.”

He wrote in the first chapter, “This book grew out of an article that was published in the January 1971 issue of the ‘Catholic World’ titled ‘Jesus Was a Feminist.’ The article in turn grew out of an undergraduate course I offered in the fall of 1970 at Temple University… called ‘Women and Religion.’ I had become a conscious feminist after I saw my wife… being constantly slighted in the academic world simply because she was a woman… I set about preparing for the fall 1970 course, but when I came to Christianity, I could not find any books on the attitude of Jesus toward women… I could find only a paragraph or two in a few books. So… I sat down with the only primary materials that dealt with Jesus, the four Gospels, and carefully went through them, taking notes on every scrap that in any way related to women.

“The first difference between the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament I noticed is the attitude toward women. There is not only a large amount of evidence of a positive attitude by Jesus toward women exhibited in the Gospels, there is also a complete lack of any evidence of a negative attitude toward women by Jesus. The same could not, of course, be said of the followers of Jesus in the rest of the New Testament… The result of looking through the Gospels was astonishingly clear and abundant---Jesus was a feminist!... When it was published… It was reproduced dozens and dozens of times… I still encounter women who tell me how important that article was in their lives… I thought it would, nevertheless, be helpful to pull together all the material that I had gathered in the past forty years on Jesus… and offer a more full-blown presentation of the evidence that Jesus was indeed a feminist.” (Pg. 1-2)

He explains, “the early church quickly became not only anti-feminist, but anti-woman… The misogynist slide continued after the New Testament… In the Jewish culture women were held to be… ‘in all things inferior to man.’ Since it was out of that milieu that the evangelists were writing… neither of them could have been the source of the feminism found in the Yeshua of the Gospels. Its only possible source was Yeshua himself… there is every likelihood that the strong feminism of Yeshua has been muted in the Gospels… In the case of women, as in that of other marginalized groups, Yeshua raised a powerful voice of protest… after the first enthusiastic response of women followers to this liberating feminist move by Yeshua, the Christian Church quickly sank back into a non-feminist, even misogynist, morass until our time.” (Pg. 21-22)

He points out, “Moreover, women became disciples of Yeshua … also in the sense of following him in his travels and ministering to him… Within this context of women being disciples and ministers, Yeshua quite deliberately broke another custom disadvantageous to women… Yeshua’s first appearance after his resurrection to any of his followers was to a woman (or women), who was then commissioned by him to bear witness of the risen Yeshua to the Eleven.” (Pg. 23)

He notes, “Perhaps the strongest and clearest affirmation on the part of Yeshua that the intellectual and ‘spiritual’ life was just as proper to women as to men is recorded in Luke’s Gospel [Lk 1038-42] in the description of a visit to Yeshua to the house of his friends Martha and Mary… Yeshua here clearly rejected the prevalent notion that the only proper place for women was ‘in the home.’ … It is difficult to imagine how Yeshua could possibly have been clearer in his insistence that women were called to the intellectual, the spiritual life just as men.” (Pg. 30-31)

After quoting Luke 1128 [‘Blessed is the womb that bore you…’], he suggests, “It is difficult to see how the primary point of this text could be anything substantially other than this. Luke and the sources he depended on (I argue below that he depended on a Proto-Luke Gospel written by an unknown woman, whom I, for convenience, name Luka) must also have been quite clear about the sexual significance of this event.” (Pg. 32)

He observes, “the positive images of women that Yeshua employed were often very exalted, at times being associated with the Reign of Heaven, likened to chosen people, and even to God herself!... Yeshua strove in many ways to communicate the notion of the equal dignity of women, and in one sense that effort was capped by his parable of the woman who found the lost coin [Lk 158-10] here Yeshua projected God in the image of a woman… it should be clear that Yeshua vigorously promoted the dignity and equality of women in the midst of a very male-dominated society. Yeshua was a feminist, and a very radical one.” (Pg. 33) Later, he adds, “Yeshua did not shrink from applying a female image to himself either; he likened himself [Lk 1334] to a hen gathering her chicks under her wings.” (Pg. 54)

He states, “The disciples of Yeshua were those who followed Yeshua about, listening to and living with him. This group of disciples included, in a prominent way, a number of women (some are specifically named), mainly from the more rural area of Galilee where the restrictive rules against women were less stringent than in Jerusalem. Still, they had to leave home and family and travel with a ‘rabbi,’ an unheard-of breach of custom. What is also astonishing is that these three named women, Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna, and others unnamed, PAID FOR the support of Yeshua and his other followers.” [Lk 83] (Pg. 73) He adds, “All three of the Synoptic Gospels use a form of the verb ‘diakoneo’ (to minister or serve) to describe what these women did in addition to saying that they ‘followed’ Yeshua. It is the same basic word as ‘deacon’; indeed, apparently the tasks of the deacons in early Christianity were much the same as those these women undertook.” (Pg. 74)

He argues, “[The Greek version of] Matthew strongly communicated a pro-woman message in his very structuring of the events and discourses of Yeshua, of course not found in the Aramaic Matthew… a movement of an ever-sharper focus on women in Yeshua’s life and gospel becomes at least dimly visible.” (Pg. 135) Later, he adds, “Of the forty-two passages in Luke dealing with women in the feminine, over half… are special to Luke… Here is further indication that Luke was most especially open to women in the writing of the Gospel… Vincent Taylor and Burnett Hillman Streeter were the main initiators of the likelihood of the existence of a Proto-Gospel within Luke… What clearly is very easy to sustain as a step toward claiming a woman writer of Luke’s Proto-Gospel is that one or more women disciples were responsible for the remembrance and handing on, either in oral or written form, of at least those passages which pertain in a special way to women… These women… would have been the ones to remember them and pass them on… Thus, even if she, or they, might not be proved the proximate ‘evangelist’ of the Proto-Gospel material of Luke, they should certainly, at the very least, be called ‘proto-evangelists’… What seems much more likely is … that a woman wrote down the Proto-Gospel, using largely the recollections of the community of women…” (Pg. 143-145) Later, he suggests, “The Beloved Disciple, and the source of the Fourth Gospel, was a woman, and the most likely candidate is Mary Magdalene.” (Pg. 171)

He concludes, “Without the women followers of Yeshua, and their remembering and recording… we would be missing half of the Gospels, and we would not have Christianity today…. Yeshua’s feminism, though it was practically the indispensable ‘incubator’ for Christianity, was quickly and largely suppressed by his second/third generation followers, down largely to today.” (Pg. 191)

While some of Swidler’s ideas seem rather speculative and lacking firm support, his presentation of the teachings of Jesus is excellent, and will be “must reading” for all students of the historical Jesus, for Christian feminists, or other Progressive Christians.