Gospel (142 page)

13
. Here as in many Early Church writings surfaces the obsession with women's hair and its exposure.
Any woman,
wrote Paul in
1 Corinthians
11:5–13,
who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled dishonors her head.… For if a woman will not veil herself then she should cut off her hair; but if it be disgraceful for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her wear a veil. That is why a woman ought to have authority on her head because of the angels.… Judge for yourselves: is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered?
Incommunicative to the present age, Paul's dicta on hair covering and hair length was a fetish of the Early Church; in Paul it seems to be the sole justification for men dominating women. One would be tempted to dismiss this happily overlooked Pauline passage if only this document and the subsequent fathers of the Church were not equally obsessed:
   Pseudo-Paul in
1 Timothy
2:9,
Women should adorn themselves modestly and sensibly in seemly apparel not with braided hair.…
and
1 Peter
3:1–3,
Likewise you wives, be submissive to your husbands.… Let not yours be the outward adorning with plaiting of hair.
Jerome was maniacal about exposed hair and wigs, citing a woman who wore a wig and his subsequent delight in the resulting slow death of her children, God's punishment. The normally sober Ambrose and Augustine thought nothing more shameful than exposed female hair; Cyprian wrote that it was worse to wear a wig than to commit adultery, which was a capital offense in many Early Church communities. Tertullian rages against the women of Carthage who expose their hair (
De cultu feminarum
), women who play with damnation thinking they can virginify themselves by unveiling their head (
De virginibus verlandis,
“On the Veiling of Virgins”).
   Consider in this light the shocking, improper nature of Jesus allowing his feet to be washed by a woman's loosened, exposed hair.

14
. This historical Procla may be the source of the legend of Procla, popular in the 100s and 200s, as the converted Christian wife of Pontius Pilate, dreamer of the prophetic warning (
Matthew
27:19). Pilate, rendered a Christian martyr, in a Greek apocryphal
Anaphora
prays,
“Number me not among the wicked Hebrews. Remember not evil against me or against thy servant [my wife] Procla … whom thou didst make to prophesy that thou must be nailed to the cross.”

15
.
Luke
9:46.
And an argument arose among [the Disciples] as to which of them was the greatest.

16
.
Aμαρ
ντικον.
The Never-diminishing book, literally. A popular First-Century word for “everlasting,” as if composed of amaranth, i.e.,
1 Peter
5:4.

17
. One must be careful with our genderless English language not to make this passage more protofeminist than intended.
   Even in these patriarchal times there was no controversy that the Earth
(
)
was feminine. Earth and Mother are linked commonly in the Bible, as in
Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither
(
Job
1:21). Man was made of “dust from the ground” after the first rain (
Genesis
2:6). It is also important to understand that the pagan and Christian Mother images, as in Gaia and the cult of the Virgin Mary, loving and fertile, are not the Jewish Eretz, who could be severe and judgmental, ruthless in natural disasters.

18
.
Aσωτ
α
and
σ
λγ
ɛ
ια.
The subtleties of these similar words are still debatable; this editor takes
as
ō
tía
to be wastefulness, profligacy, and
asélgeia,
as in
Mark
7:22, to have a sexual implication, of license and promiscuity.

19
. The introduction of maggots to wounds, as done by Daniel the Stylite and a number of Egyptian anchorites, was a self-effacement and a pretaste of death in the ground where worms awaited, mortification in the truest sense. The legends of the desert holy women Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt (who became a hideous hag, wearing nothing but her overlong gray hair), Pelagia (whose eyes became, wrote the Deacon James, “a sunken pit through emaciation”), and Thais (who had herself immured in an airless, lightless cell so that she might starve to death) all were great favorites of the Early Church.
   The First through Third-Century hagiographies of the Virgin Martyrs (Catherine, Agnes, Agatha, et al.), who are tortured exquisitely, show a deeply entrenched masochistic asceticism that Christianity, for the first time, made available to women. Indeed, having made it impossible for women to serve in any office in the institutional Church of the 200s–300s, the only way a woman could prove her worth to the Church was by spectacular martyrdom.

Chapter 7

1
. Matthew
(Mατθα
ος
) and Matthias
(Mατθ
ας),
differing so little in Greek, became intertwined and inextricable very early in Church history. Most accounts say Matthew first evangelized Egypt (except Jerome who puts him in Persia) and then went south to face the cannibals in Ethiopia. There is a Greek
Acts of Matthew and Andrew,
which is almost identical to a Syriac
Acts of Matthias and Andrew,
both dating from the 400s though no extant copies of it are that old. The much-adored Anglo-Saxon
Andreas,
a tale of miracles, seamanship, and cannibal-vanquishing, was based on these apocryphal, secondary acts.