Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [340]
The writer is sticking his thumb in the eye of the orthodox. The “Orthodox” church would have found these notions unacceptable. The writer means it to hurt because the purpose is important. The gender of the apostles is connected to the portrayal of the resurrection body. No one in the “orthodox” tradition (or probably anywhere else) would want to be resurrected in a female body at this time, which the culture had denigrated as an imperfect vessel for the intellect, being more easily perverted by lust. It is no surprise that the resurrection preached in these documents is less than full bodily resurrection because the female body was incomplete. Thus, a female can become a male in a material resurrection but not the other way around. Being male is important in a spiritual resurrection because the female gender is keyed to the inferior, material side of the dualist existence.
The spiritual body and immortality of the soul function to equalize the status of the afterlife, just as these documents argue for the equality of women as disciples of Jesus. The inferiority of women in this life was conceded but remedied in the next through various languages of transcendence of the feminine. In this respect, as Elaine Pagels showed in her The Gnostic Gospels, some Gnostics may have stressed the role of women in the church in a way that has not been equalled since.53
Gender and Resurrection: Perpetua
TERTULLIAN said: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” He meant that the martyr’s example of courageous indifference to suffering and death in the arena served as the stimulus for further conversions to Christianity. The spread of Christianity through the reputation of the endurance of martyrs was forcefully defended by Frend in his important work on Christian martyrdom.54 Whether or not it is entirely true that martyrdom furthered the cause of Christianity, accounts of martyrdom fueled conversions in at least two additional ways: They inspired later generations of the faithful to asceticism and motivated them to missionize foreign lands. If the martyrs had died for the faith in past generations, lay persons could win battles in ordinary life and the monks could conquer the world for Christianity.
For instance, the Passio Perpetua, also known as the Martyrdom of Perpetua, tells the events of the life of Saint Perpetua, who was martyred in the arena in Carthage on March 7,203. If it is truly her account, and some of it seems safely beyond historical doubt, it is one of the earliest pieces of Christian writing produced by a woman. And she is universally praised as a woman of virtue and valor, who practiced ascetic modesty. Her asceticism transcends sexuality in order to defeat the devil in heavenly battle. Perpetua was a young married woman of about twenty from a well-off family who was arrested with two other prisoners, her brother, her baby, and her slave, Felicitas, who is pregnant. The prisoners were eventually transported to a prison where they awaited their fate-a spectacle with wild beasts. Perpetua and Felicitas were to battle with a mad cow rather than a lion or bear because, as the narrator explains, it corresponded to their feminine nature.
While Perpetua was in prison, she had three visions. The first was of the various beasts that she might meet in the arena. The second was of herself in battle against another warrior in the arena. She recalls, “I was stripped of my clothing, and suddenly I was a man. My assistants began to rub me with oil as was the custom before a contest.