The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Holy smoke! It’s a biblical cover-up
The gospels name-drop Jesus’s female disciples – but any other explanation is missing (or was cut)
The noncanonical Gospel of Thomas has Salome making dinner for Jesus
192pp, Hodder, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £9.99
It is one of the peculiarities of Catholicism that while women make up around two-thirds of congregations in churches I attend, they cannot be priests – and are sparsely represented among the lay leadership. Other branches of Christianity may have done rather better on this score, but, even then, in the gospels that are read aloud from the pulpit on a Sunday, the principal figures around Jesus are overwhelmingly male.
Catholicism’s given reason for rejecting women priests is because Jesus picked 12 male, not female, apostles. Helen Bond and Joan Taylor, both professors in Christian history (at Edinburgh and King’s, London), take a dim view of the assumption that lies behind this explanation: namely that apostles are more important than Jesus’s disciples, whom the gospels tell us did include women.
“Apostle” comes from the Greek word to send out. Hence the apostles are best seen, they suggest, as envoys rather than a leadership cabal, while “disciple” – rarely used as a word in the Old Testament – derives from a Graeco-Roman term for those who were the closest followers of a teacher or philosopher.
In this new book, therefore, Bond and Taylor turn their spotlight on the shadowy female figures among these disciples in the gospel narratives. This appears to be something of a mission for them. Women Remembered follows on from their well-received and enlightening 2018 Channel 4 documentary on the same subject.
One example is Salome, mentioned as an afterthought in Mark’s gospel (15: 40-41) along with Mary Magdalene and Mary, mother of James, as one of “many other” women on Calvary watching Jesus die on the cross. By this stage, of course, the all-male apostles had scarpered.
No other detail is given of Salome in any of the four authorised gospel texts. So, why refer to her at all? Was it, Bond and Taylor write tantalisingly, because Salome’s name would have been well-known already in the fledgling Church to those first readers of Mark’s text, the earliest of the quartet, believed to be written around AD 70?
There are, after all, references to her in other Christian literature of the time. The Gospel of Thomas – a collection of sayings of Jesus, but excluded by the Church authorities from the canon of the New Testament – has Salome making dinner for Jesus. “You have climbed up on my couch and eaten from my table,” she tells him, clearly someone of independent means. In another non-canonical text, The Gospel of the Egyptians, of which only snippets remain, Salome asks Jesus, “How long will death rule?”
If women were of so little importance, as we have been led to believe, he might well have palmed her off, à la Michael Winner, with “calm down, dear”. Instead, he gives her a respectful and challenging reply. “So long as you women have children.”
Of course, there is a whole context for each of these non-canonical gospels, and a strong belief among some biblical scholars that their role is to embroider on what was already there in the official gospels, so as to explore challenges that came along in the centuries immediately after Jesus’s death (in the case of The Gospel of the Egyptians, probably the end-of-this-world mindset of Gnosticism). But that doesn’t stop it being intriguing.
Another argument made to good effect by the likeable authors, in this accessible and pleasurable addition to the largely impenetrable academic literature on the subject, is that the gospels as they appear in our Bibles were subject to heavy tweaking and editing over the century or two after they were written until a definitive version was agreed. And during
that time, Christianity was finding itself attacked – not just physically by the Roman authorities, but also by polemical philosophers such as Celsus (c AD 170), who asked how anyone could trust accounts of Jesus’s resurrection when “a delirious woman” (Mary Magdalene) had been the first to witness it.
Did Christian leaders, unwilling to have their masculinity impugned in an otherwise male-dominated world, edit down or even edit out the women of the gospels as a result? It would at least plausibly account for the names that just sit there, unexplained in the texts, and is an invitation to wonder for church-goers while the father gets on with his sermon.