Is Paul the Father of Misogyny and Antisemitism?

Cross Currents, Winter, 2000 by Pamela Eisenbaum

The language of family construction is so ubiquitous in Paul's writings that readers scarcely notice it. Not only does he frequently address his fellow believers as "brothers and sisters," Paul calls himself "father" (rather than "teacher" or "master" as might have been expected, and as Jesus apparently was called), while calling his congregants "children." [18] Because commentators tend to think Paul uses family terminology metaphorically, they do not see it as significant and often overlook some important details, including one very important detail present in Gal. 3:28.

I have been quoting the NRSV translation of Gal. 3:28: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you one in Christ Jesus." But this translation differs in an important way from older English translations, which tend to translate the verse as follows: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female...." The NRSV provides the more literal translation, the significance of which resides in the last phrase, "no longer male and female." This phrase is awkward in both Greek and English because of the switch from the disjunctive "neither/nor" to the conjunctive "and." Because of this mismatching and the fact that Paul does not normally use the words "male" (arsen) and "female" (thelu), it seems that the last clause constitutes a not-so-subtle allusion to God's creation of the first human beings in Genesis 1. The Genesis text from which the phrase is taken reads as follows:

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply...." (Gen. 1:27-28) God creates man and woman and then commands them to reproduce. These verses reflect the first of two stories found in Genesis concerning the origins of the human family. In the first story, God creates an originary human being, called adam in Hebrew, and then divides adam into two genders. The second story of human origins appears in the next chapter of Genesis where a similar event is described as the two becoming "one flesh." While "one flesh" has sometimes been interpreted in the modern context as a romantic vision of two people uniting sexually, it most likely refers to children, or, more broadly, to the creation of a new human family resulting from marriage.

Since the final pair of the saying in Gal. 3:28, "male and female," constitutes an allusion to the story of creation in Genesis, "male and female" serves as the paradigm through which we may interpret the other two pairs. In other words, what Paul means by "no longer Jew or Greek" ought to be interpreted in terms of what he means by "male and female." And since the latter refers to the Genesis passage cited above, it is reasonable to think that Paul envisions the same sort of family inauguration for "Jew or Greek" as he does for "male and female." Although Paul speaks in the negative ("no longer male and female") his point is not to deny the reality or importance of sexual differentiation, neither is it to negate the practice of marriage. [19] Rather, Paul uses the negative formulations to express how different kinds of people can be brought together into a unity. It is not two identical creatures who come together to create family, but two different ones. "Male and female" means difference is required at a fundamental level for the construction of family. Of course, part of the point is that although men and women are different, they are interdependent. Paul puts it nicely in 1 Cor. 11:11: "in the Lord, woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman."