After reading Genesis 2:15-3:24 use this blog to reflect, compare, and respond to your group’s assessment of the Genesis account in relationship to Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. Pay particular attention to how Eve functions for each author.
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I am a first year PhD student at Drew University. My interests include late-ancient Christianity and Feminist Theory. I will be looking at feminist interpretations of time and how they might inform our readings of late-ancient texts. I am also…
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Mar. 1st, 2008
Eve the creator and originator! Without Eve there wouldn’t be much a story. In Gen 3:6 when Eve ’sees that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight and that the tree was …to make one wise” she sets the story in motion. For Justin, Eve births the word of the serpent, again starting the story. What she birthed was knowledge of good and evil. Is that wickedness? It wasn’t out of wickedness that Eve ate the fruit, but curiosity. Justin’s condemnation seems faulty.
There is no mention of the commandment to be fruitful and multiply in Gen 2- 3 - that’s 1: 28. Is Irenaeus mixing his stories together? Eve ‘is made the cause of death’ but she is also the cause of life. As Ireneus points out there aren’t any children in the garden. I’m confused about the connection between Mary and Eve because Mary didn’t have any choice - she was told she was pregnant. Aren’t her words one of acquiescence - perhaps even despair since the punishment for this condition in her society can be death? To be obedient to me implies a choice.
Mar. 2nd, 2008
Lynda, Like you, I’m pretty sure that Irenaeus is taking interpretive freedom with the text. The biggest fault I find is his assumption that there was no sex before “the fall” and that Eve was still a virgin when she ate the fruit. For me, placing the act of sex after “the fall” gives it a negative connotation. I think Irenaeus (and others) have often used Mary’s virginity as a symbol of her innocence, naivety and lack of knowledge, which is what Eve was before she ate of the fruit in the garden. Perhaps it is a “lesson” to women that obedient and Godly women are to be “virgins” (re: naive and innocent). Look at http://www.beckijayne.com/pages/rv_popup.html
Titled “Picture of the Raped Virgin”.
Mar. 3rd, 2008
Amy, I’m already regretting looking at the link right before bed. Why do you think she glows? It’s almost the color of a warm sun. If her posture was one of confidence I would say she radiated power. Her power is going to be further diminished when the robe covers her.
Speaking of power, I found another place where Eve and Mary Magdalene get to be the protagonists and move the story along. Augustine (DeBoer, 111) writes, “Because man has fallen through the female sex, man has been restored by the female sex.”
Do we have to choose between being naive and innocent and protagonists?
Mar. 3rd, 2008
Lynda, your observation that Eve is the creator and originator is terrific. Eve is the one who had the intellectual curiosity to be interested in the serpent’s offer and so she took the apple and shared it. I read Genesis in my Catholic family Bible and then I read a new translation of Genesis in The Five Books of Moses by Robert Alter (prof of Hebrew at UCLA).
His translation notes that Eve’s name souds “suspiciously” like the Aramic word for serpent. (”..might there lurk behind the name a very different evaluation of the serpent as a creature associated with the origins of life?”)
Eve doesn’t succumb to evil but to the desire to know.
Alter’s God says now that the “human has become like one of us[gods], he may [possibly] reach out and take as well from the tree of life and live forever.” Hence the cherubim to guard the tree. ( I didn’t know cherubim are hybrids of steeds and something else, not the fat babies of the Renaissance!)
Then Irenaeus twists up the whole issue of wanting to know with sex and bam! Girls have to be virgins, obedient, naive and innocent, as Amy writes. Because what in God’s world is to be done with a woman who knows?
Mar. 3rd, 2008
I realized as I lay in bed with my lenses removed and thinking about the raped virgin how much my experience of sexuality from virginity to sexually active and as a mother prevented me from ’seeing’ the message in the picture. It didn’t occur to me to think of virginity as the power source. I see the virgin’s fetal position as post rape and the angel there to cover her shame, but oops no, the power source is extinguished by the rape and loss of virginity. Well, perhaps in a celibate man’s experience this scenerio works, but my power source burned brighter after embracing my sexuality and power to birth new life. So boom, bam , your are right, Michele and Amy, a women who knows burns very brightly.
Mar. 3rd, 2008
Mark Harden’s Artchive Martini, Simone
The Angel and the Annunciation
1333
Tempera on panel
305 x 265 cm
Uffizi, Florence
Click to view full-sized image
All,
don’t know if I did this correctly but look at Martini’s Annunciation, proto Renaissance panel that is noteworth for how it depicts Mary. The Virgin, usually painted as beatific, ecstatic, humbled when she received the angel,is seen recoiling from the angel almost in horror, clearly not thrilled by this visit.
A young woman responded to this painting in a literal, and almost visceral way — being sixteen, unmarried and pregnant (and therefore clearly sexual) was something that this young woman could relate to as being quite other than good news. It’s actually bad news in that it wrecks Mary’s life before she “even has a chance.” (Harkens back to power in virginity.) And yet, mature women embrace their sexuality and even their childbirth as the more fulsome realizations of their potential. I agree with Lynda that sexuality completes us,but the sheer magnitude of potential embodied in virginity is a powerful light.
Back it all comes back to knowing. Active sexuality empowers us because we know. We can only guess at those complexities before that.
These readings continue to leave me with a sense of suppression of the feminine, right from the get go.
Mar. 3rd, 2008
BeckiJayne’s powerful image of the raped virgin aside, the words from Luke, that Mary would be “overshadowed by the Power of the Most High,” give me the chills. It certainly gives new meaning to Psalm 91: “he will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge..you will not fear the terror of the night….” Is rape any easier when you know your rapist?
Walking a fine line, I know, to be describing this blessed event as a rape, but I can’t help thinking that women–our agency, our respect, our choices, our lives–have been raped by these many sexist words in not only Genesis, but in the words of the earliest theologians.
Just as an aside, it is said that Justin could not read or understand Hebrew, even though he considered himself a scholar. That puts a little fly in the ointment in terms of his exegesis of a Hebrew text. And talk about supersessionism! (I need to look up my notes from Virginia Burris’s history class; I’m sure I spelled that wrong.) But Justin has really mixed his metaphors!
Amy Harbo (it’s confusing having two Amy H’s in the same group!)
Mar. 3rd, 2008
I just found a more information on the dialogue which probably took place between Trypho, a Jew, and Justin, in Ephesus. Apparently, Justin would quote a passage from the Septuagint (LXX), the standard Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures, and Trypho would reply, “That is not an accurate translation of the Hebrew. You Christians have been tampering with the text!”
For I find myself wondering just how and by what Eve was defiled. Was she defiled by Adam (eventually)? Defiled by the word of the serpent? Defiled by disobedience? Or defiled by the knowledge of good and evil?
Mar. 3rd, 2008
In Justin Martyr, can someone shed some light on th antecedents in the following: “by whom (Christ) God destroys the serpent and those angels and human beings who are like HIM but gives deliverance from death to those who repent of their wickedness and believe in HIM.” I’m confused — God destroys the serpent etc who are like God (who seek to know as God knows?) but gives deliverance to those who believe in him (Jesus?) Is Justin really telling us not to ask questions?
It is true on every level that knowledge confuses everything (look at this course!) But we have eyes to see and ears to hear, both God given. And isn’t it knowledge that enriches us even as it challenges us? Eve doesn’t “disbelieve” as Iraneus writes; she seeks and discovers the difference between good and evil. A dirty job, to be sure, but it’s interesting that God considered it women’s work.
Mar. 3rd, 2008
Michele, I agree that knowledge complicates everything, yet it is knowledge that makes us human, no? So if Eve was the one to take the first step towards gaining knowledge, what does that say about Adam’s humanity? If knowledge makes us human, what were we “pre-fall”? I also think it is interesting, at least in my translation (Jewish Study Bible), that God only throws “the man” out of the garden… “see, the man. . . he might reach out his hand. . . He drove out the man” (3:22-24)
I understand that thinking of the annunciation as a “rape” is alarming and makes one want to recoil, but I agree with Amy Harbo in understanding that women have been raped for ages of their agency and voice– I feel like Gabriel (the angel) in Becki Jayne’s image has a look of pity towards Mary. Perhaps he’s the only one who will ever really know what happened?
Mar. 4th, 2008
The Genesis 2 story raises the issue of a jealous god. Eating of the tree of knowledge makes Eve and Adam like god and that brings about punishment. The tower of Babel shows us the jealous god again. Are Justin and Irenaues following a similar pattern of punishing that which they cannot control?
Mar. 4th, 2008
Interesting art: Rossetti’s Annunciation shows an emaciated and repressed girl (with red hair) recoiling. Follows the rape theme, esp. if one views rape as a demand to do something you don’t want to do (Jesus wants his cup taken away in Gethsemane, the Virgin would prefer a different gig).
Someone brought to my attention the Venus theme, depicted in Botticelli’s the Birth of Venus. Venus on a clamshell is naked, a philosophical purity. His painting of a clearly sexual Venus seducing Mars features Venus clothed. Doesn’t this mirror Eve naked before knowledge, clothed in a leather outfit fashioned by God after she knows?
Mar. 4th, 2008
Most interesting to note that it was Irenaeus who first proposed putting that the first four gospels be put in a canon. And here is why: “The Gospels could not possibly be either more or less in number than they are. Since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is spread over all the earth, and the pillar and foundation of the Church is the gospel, and the Spirit of life, it fittingly has four pillars, everywhere breathing out incorruption and revivifying men. From this it is clear that the Word, the artificer of all things, being manifested to men gave us the gospel, fourfold in form but held together by one Spirit” (Against Heresies, 3.11.8). Irenaeus was not a big fan of the gnostics, to state it mildly.
Mar. 4th, 2008
When I read the Genesis account of creation we were assigned, I see in it an ancient people’s attempt to explain and rationalize human suffering in light of an all powerful God.
Another way to regard Mary being used as a vessel to bring forth the Messiah (theotokis) is to read Luke in light of Ezekiel 8-11. The people were waiting for God to rebuild Zion. Ezekiel’s imagery is that of God descending to earth to inhabit the Temple and people falling to their knees in awe. How is this similar to the Lukan account of an angel coming to earth to inform Mary that God will inhabit Mary’s womb (human tabernacle) with Godself and the subsequent human reaction?
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