Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean by Kraemer Ross Shepard

Author:Kraemer, Ross Shepard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Women, Religion, and Gender in the Letter

For those with interests in the study of women, religion, gender and history, the representations of women in the Letter and its uses of gender are especially vexing. Narratives about potentially historical individual Jewish women from this period are virtually nonexistent, and an historian could easily be forgiven for wishing that some portion of Severus’s accounts of women might be true, however distorted. One can easily sympathize with Bradbury’s acceptance of this element of the Letter as historically reliable, and his admiration for the courage of the women who clung to their ancestral religion in the face of extraordinary pressure. Yet close analysis suggests that not only do rhetorical strategies dictate much of the rest of the Letter as a whole, so, too, what Severus says about women has more to do with the uses of gender in the narrative than it does with actual Minorcan Jewish women. The women who continue to resist conversion serve as the ultimate exemplars of Jewish stubbornness in the face of the reasonableness and truth of Christianity. Gendered as female, this stubbornness is itself configured as feminine insubordination and resistance to divinely licensed masculine authority generally. In several instances, Severus constructs women’s resistance to Christianity as marital insubordination and their ultimate acceptance of Christianity as appropriate female submission to marital, ecclesiastical, and divine male authority. Nevertheless, groups of unnamed women, as well as more individually identified women, appear at several interesting points in the narrative. Apart from the Christian Theodora, all the women explicitly present in the text are, in fact, Jewish women.

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