St. Paul…the Feminist?

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It’s really amazing how a course on the Bible will make you look differently at a book you thought you knew at least a little something about.

In reading some texts for my class this weekend, I am really blown away by how many touchy theological issues ride on the Pauline books, and most specifically on whether or not Paul actually wrote 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Colossians, Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians. For instance, one can make a pretty strong argument for a feminist reading of Paul if one is left with Corinthians and Galatians as the corpus of Pauline texts on gender (those are the three undisputed Pauline texts that talk about gender issues the most). This reading actually starts to make me think Paul isn’t the ass I’ve thought he was for the last few years.  However, if you add in 1 and 2 Timothy, the feminist argument gets much harder to make, and in fact, 1 and 2 Timothy and Ephesians say some pretty contradictory things to what Paul said about gender issues in Corinthians and Galatians. There are some pretty major issues riding on this interpretation.

Of course, if we do say that those books mentioned were not written by Paul as they claim to be, what are we supposed to do with them? They’re in the canon and they’re not going anywhere. How do we make sense of really important issues like gender and race in a theological sense if we accept this change?

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