On that same subject, Jilli! I ganked the Adam Ant video for "Stand and Deliver" - pure Highwayman fashion porn.

Yay!

I ganked the Adam Ant video for "Stand and Deliver" - pure Highwayman fashion porn.

Squeee! My favorite!

crawling back in

So tired. So sluggish. Got ashes, though, and generally feel more peaceful and less like chewing my own arm off.

Re Paul, Tep said pretty much what I would have said, which I got from The New Eve In Christ, a book by a British theologian and Bible languages expert named Mary Hayter, which sadly appears to have never even been published in the U.S. at all. Hayter took a fresh look at Paul by taking a very, very old look at him -- tossing all the English translations she had and going back to the oldest surviving texts of his letters in an attempt to get as close to the originals as possible (this was oh so many years ago and I can't recall whether she was reading Latin or Aramaic, but I think maybe Latin).

And what she found was that a lot of the words in more recent Latin translations, and all English translations, that raise womens' hackles were in the oldest texts either a lot less value-laden or not there at all. As Tep notes, Paul considered some women colleagues, and there's by now pretty decent evidence that a good chunk of the people performing priestly functions (there wasn't a codified "priest" position as such yet) in the early decades of Christianity were women.

Which was a problem, since the only experience any of these communities had of women actively participating in worship services was the temple prostitutes. And for the first couple of decades of its existence, Christianity considered itself a sect of Judaism, and practicing Christians wanted desperately to not have to sneak around underground but to be accepted by their larger faith. Most of Paul's strictures about women covering their heads and keeping silent were specifically addressing that fear of scandal: in order to make it clear that their presence and participation had nothing to do with the sexual pleasure of the men in attendance, women should dress with dignity, speak with calmness and dignity (the word "silent" was an interpolation by a later translator), and cover their heads. That way they'd visibly signal to everyone that they were full participants, nobody's prostitutes, and on an exactly equal footing before God with the men, and the larger community wouldn't be scandalized.

Hayter did marvelous linguistic detective work in this book. She went over every passage in Paul, looking not only at the offending words but every word, as well as at other letters and stories and legal and political documents written by his contemporaries. She checked for context, looked for all the possible nuances of meaning for various ambiguous words, compared translations of a particular word in Paul to translations of that word in non-Pauline texts A, B, C, etc.

And the conclusion she came to was that he'd been by and large dicked around with by his translators; that in the closest thing we have to the original texts, he's clearly uncomfortable with women in priestly authority, but also accepting that it's happening despite his discomfort, and trying to set standards to let it to keep happening without wrecking either the women's reputations, their new little communities, or the larger communities by whom they were still trying to be accepted. And in later centuries, when that small gasping breath of egalitarianism had been totally smothered, translators looked at what he'd written, said, "No fuckin' way, Jack!", and wrote down what they thought he really must have meant, because he couldn't possibly mean what they were seeing, because only a nutjob would say things like that about women, who as we know may not even have souls at all.

That sounds like a way cool book, JZ. I must track down a copy.

Oh, dear me, Cashmere, THANK YOU. I love the Mingulay song so damn much and I've never found a recording of it before.

swoons

I can't recall whether she was reading Latin or Aramaic, but I think maybe Latin

Paul wrote in Greek, I believe. (As did all of the NT writers, Greek being the lingua franca of the eastern half of the empire and spoken along with Latin by a good chunk of the western half. Though I've seen speculation that Matthew and maybe Hebrews (I think it was those two) were either written in Aramaic originally or written in Greek by an Aramaic speaker whose Greek was poor.)

Another reason that Paul said (I can't remember which letter) that women should keep silent in church is b/c when the early Christians met, they still sat in a way that the men were separate from the women, as in Jewish synagogues.

If there was something that a woman didn't understand during a meeting/teaching, it was common that she would try to get her husband's attention so that he could explain it, and this led to a lot of chatter back and forth.

So what Paul basically meant in this instance was "Tell them to stop interrupting, and to ask you later when it won't disrupt the teaching."

Interesting thought. I bet that happened to Biblical things a lot and after all this time there's been a fair amount of hands in it all. Some good and some just taking a break from writing "Kill".

Paul wrote in Greek, I believe.

D'oh! Struggling to remember specific passages, that sounds right. But I last read it 13 or 14 years ago. I'm stunned that I can even half-assedly remember any of it.

I think that in most of my religious education, there was much more of an emphasis on modesty than on chastity. Which kind of leads there, anyway -- kind of difficult to have sex with a guy if he's not supposed to see your thighs -- but with a really different emphasis. (I remember a conversation I had with a friend who went through the same Hebrew school system that I did -- she was watching Newlyweds, and was totally aghast at what Jessica Simpson was wearing. "She calls herself religious! She's just parading around in a bikini! And her father is there! And he's a minister!" And this friend is not terribly modest herself, or terribly religious, but was just having a lot of trouble getting how someone could say that she's religious and still have no problem going on national TV in a bikini.)