Hillary's Not the Only Woman to Make History

Want a summer read that’s part adventure story, part biography, part introduction to biblical manuscripts, part historical drama, and part faith journey? If yes, check out Janet Soskice’s The Sisters of Sinai.

The main characters are identical twins Agnes and Margaret Smith of Scotland. Their travels lead, among other places, to St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. There Agnes discovered one of the oldest manuscripts of the Gospels ever found.The sisters’ staunch Presbyterian father, widowed shortly after their births in 1843, raised his girls as one might raise boys in the Victorian era—educated, physically active, and engaged in the life of the mind. And he kept a promise that whenever his daughters learned a language, he would take them to where that language was spoken. Because the twins loved to travel, early on they mastered French, German, Spanish, and Italian. Their deep interest in the Bible and its languages eventually led them to add Hebrew, ancient and modern Greek, Arabic, and old Syriac to their resumes. It was knowledge of the latter, known only to a few people on earth, that opened the doors to Agnes’s big discovery.Both sisters were widowed early after inheriting massive sums from distant relatives. One twin had been married to a man who traveled widely; the other, to the librarian and manuscript custodian at Cambridge. Reading of the sisters’ unlikely educations combined with their father’s promise, the means to travel, and the contacts their husbands brought into their lives will leave readers marveling at the providence of God. A pilgrimage to the sites of Abraham and Moses took the women to the land of the pyramids, and a hunch about forgotten manuscripts led straight to a dark cupboard in St. Catherine’s Monastery. Agnes’s discovery had enormous ramifications at a time when people were questioning the now-established early dating of New Testament manuscripts.The Sisters of Sinai reads like an adventure book. The author herself has heady credentials: she’s Professor in Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College. Writing with the storytelling skill of a novelist combined with the research savvy of a scholar, Soskice recounts the twins’ challenges: traveling on camel and floating the Nile in a time of cholera when women were thought to need male escorts; interpersonal conflicts with jealous scholars who despised the sisters for lacking university degrees; and the misogyny that kept closing doors to the women and minimizing their contributions. But Solskice also provides an introduction to the world of biblical manuscripts that engages rather than makes eyes glaze over. And she draws on diaries to include the sisters’ internal pilgrimages of faith with their good, good God.Take this one to the beach; sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.THE SISTERS OF SINAI: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels, by Janet SoskiceIllustrated. 316 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. Published in 2010.

My Post on Women's History

Over at the In A Mirror Dimly blog, I'm featured as the guest columnist today. If you're one of my regular readers, you'll recognize a familiar topic with me--women's history, and especially how we tell the story of women in the church's history. You can read my post here. 

Women's History: The Pendulum Swings

Recently in my Role of Women class we had guest speaker Dr. Barry Jones, who teaches at DTS and serves on the preaching team at Irving Bible Church. He shared with our group the process of how his church moved toward a stronger affirmation of women’s public ministry and what they learned—pro and con—in the process.As part of our discussion, he provided some historical information from Women, Ministry, and The Gospel, by Tim Larson at Wheaton. He showed how at the time of first-wave feminism, the church was more committed to gender equality than the culture at large. People such as John Wesley, George Whitfield, D. L. Moody, A. J. Gordon [Gordon College/Gordon-Conwell], A. B. Simpson and John Roach Stranton all affirmed women’s public teaching ministries. Even the wife of conservative W. A. Criswell, architect of the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Church, spent years of Sundays teaching a mixed-gender Sunday school class for several hundred people. (I remember a time when I could hear her teaching that class on the radio.)So, what happened? Why did the pendulum swing back toward limiting women’s public speaking in the church? Dr. Jones offered three reasons:. Men returned from war. Post-WWII, men displaced women as they returned from combat and wanted their factory jobs back. The culture at large saw the need to re-establish the role of men, and part of the accompanying dogma was that a women’s “place” is in the home. I would add to this the influence of Sigmund Freud. The concept of “penis envy” was applied to women who liked their jobs and wanted to keep them. Such women were told that they were not fully sexualized, and their desire to work demonstrated something amiss in their sexual development.. Second-wave feminism. Once women gained the right to vote, the movement had splintered, as people differed on what to do next about injustices to women. Should they fight for literacy? Go after equal pay? Some in the movement saw reproductive rights as the next step. The church reacted, and we see this reflected in more conservative translations of the Bible (compare the KJV’s 1611 translation of 1 Tim 2 with later translations), and with a push toward more of a one-size-fits-all view of masculinity and femininity.. Twentieth-century Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism, born as a movement in 1901, had made great gains worldwide, and conservatives reacted. The result was a marked difference in how scholars viewed various forms of the word “prophesy.” Since some of the “woman” texts in the New Testament contain this word, a more conservative view meant less freedom for women to impart content in public settings.

Let's Hear It For the Girls

A wonderful part of PhD work is having experts direct me to resources I never knew existed. This week I received via Inter Library Loan a book one of my advisers recommended in a three-volume series titled Women Writing in Latin. I know that sounds boring as rip, but hang with me a sec, because it I found it fascinating.

The volume that pertains to my work is the first in the series, Writing Latin in Roman Antiquity, Late Antiquity, and the Early Christian Era. And I read it from cover to cover today. In it I found writings from women in the first and second centuries BC and AD, three of whom were Christ-followers.

The first was Proba, a woman well versed in the poetry of Virgil so she mixed his phrases and style with Genesis to create a new epic poem called a canto about the creation of humans and the Fall. Gorgeous stuff.

Second I read the journal of Perpetua (in translation) about a young mother who was martyred with her friend Felicity. I was familiar with their story, but I had never read the entire account in Perpetua's own words. And it is some inspiring, make-you-gulp stuff. Such courage!

The author of A Lost Tradition, in writing about Perpetua, said, "While one can debate various positions about Christianity's effect on the social standing of women in the Roman Empire, unquestionably it released previously untapped well-springs of energy among women to whom the Gospel was preached. Of the writings which we possess or even know about from women in the Roman Empire after the days of Augustus, only some of the poetry of Sulpicia is extant; all the other works are by Christian women."

In other words we would have almost nothing from women (period!) without Christians' writings. And here's an additional observation by another historian: "Perpetua's assumption of leadership within her group exemplifies one of the aspects of Christianity that particularly attracted women. Traditionally in the Mediterranean cultures that formed the Roman Empire, women were expected to confine themselves to the maintenance of their home and family life and engage very little in public life... In the itinerant ministry of Jesus, however, and in the early church, women played prominent roles.... Early Christian communities, moreover, not only valued women generally as leaders in the church, but also esteemed their expression of ideas whether in oral or written form. As God was believed to speak to both sexes, both men and women could, and did, prophesy in church."

The third woman recounted her pilgrimage to holy sites from her home to Jerusalem and then Asia Minor (Turkey).

What did these documents tell me? They suggested once again that early understandings of sex roles in Christendom liberated women in the best sense of the word. Only after the church moved from homes to buildings and added a clear clergy/laity divide (in the century after Perpetua) do we see a shift toward more negative views about women and what they could and couldn't do.

Women and History

I find it interesting, and not in a good way, how often historians have vilified women by emphasizing their roles as seductresses.

Case in point: When we refer to the widowed Old Testament figure, Judah, son of Jacob, most of us don't immediately think, "the guy who paid for a prostitute." But when we refer to Tamar, the woman he slept with, we do usually think of how she seduced him. (If we even know the story, that is.) Yet Tamar was within her levirate rights in seeking to establish a descendant named for her deceased husband. Judah was the one with banal motives.

Mention Bathsheba, and most think of the woman who "brought David down" rather than the woman David had his military guys sieze and bring to the palace for his pleasure. She probably thought the king was off at war and not standing on his palace balcony when she bathed on the rooftop (where people usually bathed, I might add).

When we think of Cleopatra, we usually think of the woman who seduced Caesar and Mark Antony, but when we think of Caesar and Mark Antony, do we immediately think of them as the guys who slept with hundreds of women? (Because they certainly did.)

One of the things I like about Stacy Schiff's November release, Cleopatra: A Life, is her focus on Cleopatra as a plain-looking, shrewd administrator. We know from coins that the queen herself would have approved that she was no Elizabeth Taylor look-alike. The woman was, however, a fantastic leader over a number of decades, if we consider how she cared for her people and assured peace for her nation.

A NY Times book reviewer put it well: "Instead of the stereotypes of the 'whore queen,' Ms. Schiff depicts a 'fiery wisp of a girl' who grows up to become an enterprising politician: not so much a great beauty as a charismatic and capable woman, smart, saucy, funny and highly competent, a ruler seen by many of her subjects as a 'beneficent guardian' with good intentions and a 'commitment to justice.'”

After a several-month break for comps, holidays and snow days, I'm reading the final chapters of Schiff's book. I predict it'll garner a stack of awards. Maybe even a Pulitzer. Such a terrific blend of research and insight.