the gospel apart from feminism is no gospel at all . . .

Adam came first.
Then Eve.
Adam was benignly obedient, though gullible.
Eve . . . ehh, not so much.
Adam (men) now as a result has to labor and toil.
Eve stays home and raises babies.
The greedy son kills the good one. . . again, thanks to mom.
Their daughters . . . well we don't know their names, and maybe that's for the best if they're anything like dear old Eve.
So the story goes.

This is Divine Revelation and historical fact according to some. It is a reliable source that women are not to ultimately be trusted (by men), and that with this classic case study of what happens when women are left to their own devices is destined to be bad. So, basically religion is a 'man' thing. This is something revealed by God himself. Don't question it.

Yeah, right. Lot's of people are questioning it now. Not least, Elisabeth Fiorenza. I'm reading her book In Memory of Her. I had heard of the book for years, before I started reading it this month. The "Her" the title is referring to is the anonymous woman in Mark 14. This woman makes a bold move to come in to the Passover feast, in the presence of the heads political-religious authority, and pour perfumed oil on Jesus' head. Now any Jew with an IQ over 50 would have seen the symbolism here. The woman was not trying to make Jesus smell good, she was annointing him as the King of Israel. To pour oil on another's head would have instantly brought to mind stories of Elijah and Elisha annointing the former kings. Recall who Jesus was in the presence of . . . religious teachers. I assure you this sort of biblical allusion was not lost on them.

Keep in mind also, that this was no cheap bottle of olive oil. This was perfumed oil. John reports that it was worth close to a year's wages. Imagine someone pouring 30,000 dollars worth of perfume on someone else's head. The likelihood of this being a mere gesture of repentance at the feet of Jesus, sounds very unlikely!!

Here we have something far more volatile than a sign of an anonymous woman acknowledging the divinity of Jesus and asking for forgiveness. We have a woman (evidently one that could afford to possess a $30,000 bottle of perfumed oil and spend it as she saw fit) walking into a room with representatives of religious and political authority present, and in their sight in open defiance of patriachal culture, annointing Jesus as the King of Israel, a.k.a. the Son of God.

The likelihood is that this woman was rich, and very influential. Evidently she was also bold enough to make an explosive political statement in the presence of the most feared leaders of Jewish culture. Notice it wasn't Peter or John that annointed Jesus. Jesus' male disciples either lacked the courage, or didn't believe in him enough to make such a statement, especially in the presence of such society. No, Peter who had claimed Jesus as the Christ, didn't have the courage to proclaim this to heads of power, but a woman did. They attack her as frivilous, not to mention insubordinate . . . and Jesus defends her. In fact he makes a statement that his message is now inseperable from her action. He assumes that if we proclaim him as King/Lord, we must also proclaim the woman who annointed him as such!

Fiorenza's point to all of this is that we have been deprived of this; that Jesus' words have been suppressed partially because we no longer even know the woman's name. Matthew and Mark are silent on her name. John, written at least 25 years after Mark, tries to connect the dots by assigning her to be Mary, Martha's sister. Luke, written for Gentiles with an even greater bias against women, reduces this woman from being a woman of influence and wealth to a sinful woman seeking repentance. In Luke and John she does not have the privilege of annointing Jesus as King, but instead pours the oil on his feet, re-emphasizing her lowly status and Jesus as the mediator of mercy. The proud woman who boldly proclaimed Christ's identity is reduced to a friend or a whore groveling at his feet in need of forgiveness.

Yet, in reading Mark we can question why is it that immediately after this particular event Judas goes to the high priests to betray Jesus? Had he gone too far in allowing a woman to annoint him? What kind of Kingdom would this Messiah bring if a female was allowed to serve the role of Elijah the prophet, annointing the King? Surely a woman's annointing could not count. Surely this could not be part of the gospel of Jesus the Christ!!(Annointed!) How could this homeless rabbi who had spent so many nights hungry sleeping in the open wandering from town to town let a woman waste $30,000 on an annointing that couldn't really be told to others with any due seriousness? What kind of army would follow a king like that???

It's well known to anyone who knows history, that history belongs to the victors. The last blow that is given to the repressed peoples of history is having their memories stolen. How many American history books in U.S. schools are written by Native Americans? How many Mexican authors are allowed to teach us about Texas history? How many Iraqis are given free voice on U.S. TV right now?

How many female authors are there in the Bible?

The Bible is a rhetorical document: designed to persuade particular audiences to believe in Jesus of Nazareth. It makes sense that it would have been counter-productive in the first century to make the NT a women's liberation document when Graeco-Roman culture was the desired target. Yet, if there were any documents written by women they are largely lost to us now. We have no history of 'Acts of the Female Apostles', why?

With historical critical knowledge it is becoming increasingly hard to justify the idea that Jesus' movement was really patriachal in nature, or that women were allowed only minor supportive roles. It appears instead that the memory of women in Christianity has been firmly repressed by men who have seen Christianity as one more religious means to preserve the secondary status of women in history.

It appears that the Bible is a male document, with male biases, but which still contains numerous traces of how things really were. And, they were much differnt than what we have long thought to be the case. Recovering the meaning of such traces becomes an act of history-making which thereby gives life and freedom to those whom politically-motivated religious doctrines have long silenced.

I find this to be quite in line with Jesus' character. After all, he was a man who seemed to challenge everything that lended support to hierarchies and power structures that held so many men and women from having life to the full. I don't believe there is a single place where Jesus upholds patriarchy in family or society as a God-ordained system. Only in this understanding to I find it possible to see how a community arose, fixed on the belief that Christ superceded all distinctions:
Jews/Gentiles
Slave/Free
even Male/Female (Gal. 3:28)