Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [287]
Through their maleness, all will enter the kingdom of heaven. The purpose of the Logion was to include women in the order if they too obeyed the monastic rules eschewing luxury and sexuality, on the model of Mary, who was after all, the first to see. But the language impresses us as so sexually biased as to make the message difficult for us to receive. In point of fact, the message also seems consonant with the angelic life expressed in Luke: Some of the privileged will live as angels while on earth and so become them when they are transformed into their eternal beings.
We must remember the perception of Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis of what angel Christology meant to the Gospel tradition.28 Angelic status was a transcendence of sexuality. Here, in place of angelic life, we have a similar notion expressed with the language of the spirit. This ascetic behavior meant eschewing all sexual life. This career, in turn, also prohibited marriage and childbearing, which were crucial to what it meant to be a “woman” in ancient Greco-Roman society. Thus, ascetic life, meant an autonomous life, otherwise only available to men. If this is the type of asceticism represented in The Gospel of Thomas, and the ascetic behavior is a propaedeutic to receiving revelation through contemplation, then the text allows for women to access the means of spiritual enlightenment in ways that are not easily available elsewhere in society.29 It just picks a way that seems strange to us to express it.
Another way in which Mary could become “male” was through a return to the Platonic myth of the andgrogyne. April D. deConick writes, “Since Eve was taken from Adam’s side, so she must reenter him and become “male” in order to return to the prelapsarian state of Adam before the gender division.30 Active creation as a prerequisite for salvation must be understood as a mandatory procedure while the disciple is still on earth. Jesus said, “During the days when you ate what is dead, you made it alive” (Logion 11). The substitution must come before bodily death. The fact that the disciples can turn dead matter into living substance indicates that a transformation from death to life is possible on the earthly level. “Jesus said, ‘When you make the two one, you will become children of humanity, and then you say, “Mountain, move from here!’ it will move” (Logion 106). In this version of Jesus’ exploits, Jesus was not speaking of events to come in an eschatological future but stressing the disciples ability to transform the present miraculously by their meditation and faith.31
This “return” to the androgynous figure of Genesis is also characteristic of Valentinian Gnosticism and, to a lesser extent, to Jewish mysticism. Valentinian Gnostics and mystics believed that the very existence of two distinct and opposed sexes was caused by a tragic and unnecessary division for which humanity had suffered ever since.32 This notion was evident early in the Thomasine tradition: “When you are in the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one, you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?” (Logion 11:3). The Valentinians as well believed that a redeemed person “radiated a vast serenity in which sexual desire had been swallowed up with all other signs of inner division.”33 The Gnostics believed that sexual temptation was a symbol of more deep-seated societal ills, and therefore the transcendence of desire was a “resurrection” of the self.34 Many of Jesus’ sayings in The Gospel of Thomas can be associated with encratism, an ascetic lifestyle characterized by abstinence, dietary restrictions, and voluntary poverty.
Finally, Mary’s transformation can be interpreted as a movement from the physical and earthly