“The basic celibacy plot appears in nearly all the apocryphal acts. A woman hears the message of a Christian apostle and gives up sex with her husband. The jilted husband is usually a powerful political man—a king, a Roman proconsul, a friend of the emperor—so he can get the apostle executed. The apostle’s message not only disrupts a marriage; it also seems to threaten the city or the empire.” –from, again, David Brakke’s Lecture series The Apocryphal Jesus
Just finished both the audio lecture and the study notes today. But before I move on, I really want to address this particular issue because, as serious as the subject of the lecture seems, it really did evoke a lot of chuckles in the same sense that one might chuckle at a lot of Greek and Roman myths. Believe it or not, as much as the writers of the apocryphal texts had serious religious and spiritual agendas, they were also out to entertain.
That said, excuse me for devolving to common male memes, but my first response was (and I am going by testimony from my married friends: isn’t that what women generally do anyway? It’s like the old joke:
?: what food has been shown to reduce a woman’s sexual drive by 80%…
Answer: wedding cake….
Now before I get an onslaught of testimonies from women about how great the sex has been with their husbands since they got married, I am not in a position question that. This is not some kind of red pill rally. It was just a facetious riff I couldn’t resist.
That said, there are two theories offered for this common theme. On one hand, there is the more feminist one that sees female celibacy as a form of liberation. And you have to think of that in the context of the paternalistic society that women were working under at the time. In fact, it was the encouragement of this female rebellion that, in many of these stories, led to execution of the apostles that encouraged these women to do so. And given that all of the apocryphal texts were centered around the apostles associated with Christ, it is easy to imagine Jesus having this same effect on women and, consequently, sealing his doom.
The other theory is that the motif was meant to highlight the superiority of the apostles as leaders of men –that is in opposition to the pagan leaders as represented by the husbands of the women that, having converted to Christianity, chose to refuse their husbands sex. And this is the more interesting theory in that it puts some shine on more contemporary theory that tends to elevate the feminine over the masculine much as the old apocryphal texts did. What likely made Jesus and the apostles so profound, and appealing to women, was their recognition of the value of the feminine in the face of the macho hubris of the Roman Empire.
And we can see the residual effect of that in thinkers like Lacan who made the distinction between the feminine (what he referred as the eternal (and the phallic: that which creates change in the temporal world.