No "male and female"

The resurrection ends the curse of patriarchy

A curious thing happens during the baptismal confession¹ that Paul sets out in his letter to the Galatians:

There can be neither Judaean nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there cannot be male and female, for you are all one in the Anointed One Jesus.²

Paul’s syntax breaks parallel structure.³ Notice that Paul's neither's and nor's stop before male and female. With male and female, Paul sees need for neither neither nor nor.

Paul's break after his neither/nor approach to his Jew/Greek and slave/freeman dichotomies seems to make a reference to the creation story in which God created humanity "male and female," according to theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza.⁴ By alluding to the creation of humans as "male and female," Paul also alludes to the curse under which Adam would “rule over” Eve.⁵

Despite the broken syntax, all three pairings in Paul’s confession have something in common. Like Jew/Greek and slave/freeman, the male/female dichotomy contains one dominant party in what would constitute public life in Roman Judaea. According to Fiorenza, Paul’s “no male and female” means that Adam’s domination cannot be:

Gal. 3:28c does not assert that there are no longer men and women in Christ, but that patriarchal marriage—and sexual relationships between male and female—is no longer constitutive of the new community in Christ.⁶

In other words, marriage itself—and power structures within a society’s concept of marriage—doesn’t signify in Jesus’s alternative polis.

Baptism expands public life to women

Paul made freedom from Jewish exclusivity, from slavery, and from patriarchy part of a confession of faith made at baptism. And baptism itself, not the more exclusive sign of circumcision, brought women into this freedom and into this alternative political community practicing it. In Messiah, theologian N.T. Wright says, women were "baptized just as men are, whereas circumcision had of course been another encoded sign of male superiority."⁷ Circumcision, which was the male-dominated sign of membership in the Mosaic covenant, suggested women's lower place in the political community. When Paul argues for baptism and against circumcision as a demarcation of inclusion in the new creation’s community,⁸ he is, among other things, asserting women’s political rights.

Wright finds in Galatians 3:28 something like the same overthrow of patriarchy that Fiorenza finds:

In Mishnah Berakoth, when numbers are being sought to make up the requisite minimum of three to say the common grace at meals, women, slaves and children are expressly excluded. Paul expressly includes them. That, too, is the import of the well-known synagogue prayer, included in the Jewish liturgy to this day, in which the worshipper thanks God for not making him ‘a gentile, a slave or a woman’ (at which point the women thank God that he has made them according to his will). One of the best known of all Paul’s ‘unity’ texts, Galatians 3.28, seems to be staring this tradition in the face, and thus outdoing even the Jewish stress on a united community with a different dimension of ‘unity’ altogether . . .⁹

An alternate, inclusive political community within empire

This praxis of an expanded, united community meant much to those living in an empire. Christian assemblies were political; that is, they didn't withdraw from a public life but operated openly in contradistinction to Rome's version of it. For women and slaves, Fiorenza says, baptism signaled a new life of political freedom within empire:

. . . the Christian community . . . provided an experience of an alternative community in the midst of the Greco-Roman city for those who came in conflict with it. As an alternative association which accorded women- and slave-initiates equal status and roles, the Christian missionary movement was a conflict movement which stood in tension with the institutions of slavery and the patriarchal family.¹⁰

The ekklēsia is still called to be this “alternative association.” Many Christians today, however, see the equality of women and men suggested by Galatians 3:28 as either "positional" (read: theoretical or impossibly aspirational) or posthumous (read: reserved for the sweet by-and-by). But "no male and female" is neither merely positional nor merely posthumous. "No male and female" is functional and fixed in the present as well as the future.

The resurrection’s equality and its public emphasis

Once we understand that we are are "risen with Christ" and that the new creation has come—that the kingdom of God is as present as it is future—then we can accept that Jesus's remarks about what the resurrection is like apply to the present, too. Jesus's response to the Sadducees' hypothetical about a woman seven times widowed is not just a clever attack on the Sadducees' implied assumption (i.e., resurrected people marry) within their implied argument against the resurrection. Jesus’s response also sets out our present priorities:

Jesus said to them, “The sons of this age marry and the women are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage; for they cannot even die anymore, for they are like angels, and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.¹¹

By downplaying marriage, Jesus suggests to the Sadducees the public nature of the resurrection. With Jesus's own resurrection, this age to come, including women's full participation in God's politics, has come.

Paul also says as much when, after he gives the Corinthians some general marriage counsel, he urges them to put the public life of God's kingdom before the private life of marriage:

. . . the time we live in will not last long. While it lasts, married men should be as if they had no wives . . .¹²

"No 'male and female,'" then, means we must put public life before private life. It means also that we must lay aside social distinctions based on sex and marriage for the sake of public life and the ekklēsia that models it.

Photo by Parker Coffman on Unsplash

The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

1. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza points out that Galatians 3:28 is a “baptismal declaration.” Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “The Praxis of Coequal Discipleship,” in Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society, ed. Richard A. Horsley (Harrisburg, Pa: Trinity Press International, 1997), 224–41.

2. Galatians 3:28. Hart, New Testament, 374.

3. I’m a composition instructor, and I realize that not everyone will find Paul’s unconventional syntax as curious as I do.

4. Fiorenza, 227.

5. Genesis 3:16 NNAS.

6. Fiorenza, 227-28.

7. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness (Pts. 1 & 2), 389.

8. E.g., “Baptized into union with him, you have all put on Christ like a garment.” Galatians 3:27 REB. “Circumcision is nothing; uncircumcision is nothing; the only thing that counts is new creation!” Galatians 6:15 REB.

9. Wright, 387-88.

10. Fiorenza, 229.

11. Luke 20:34-36 NNAS.

12. 1 Corinthians 7:29 REB.