Vsurping auctoritie over ye man

There are some days of teaching when I'm not entirely sure what the students are thinking. Am I molding their young minds, freeing them from the labyrinth of their limited experience and granting them daedalian wings to soar into the sky, or am I just pissing them off by being too blatantly and gleefully subversive?

Then again, I don't really care. I do what has to be done. For example, after having mis-cited and mis-quoted 1 Timothy 2 t'other day and obviously pissing all the evangelicals off by suggesting that their churches tend selectively to ignore the more backward and misogynistic statements of Saint Paul, I felt it was my duty to repeat the exercise in a more scholarly fashion, so I looked up the passage in the 1568 Bishops' Bible, the version Edmund Spenser would no doubt have been most familiar with while writing the Faerie Queene in the 1580s.

For those of you who are too heathen to recall the passage offhand, here's that version of 1 Timothy 2:9-15. "I wyll," Paul writes

9 Lykewyse also the women, that they araye them selues in comely apparell, with shamefastnesse, and discrete behauiour, not in brayded heere, either golde or pearles, or costly aray: 10 But (that becommeth women professyng godlynesse) through good workes. 11 Let the woman learne in scilence in all subiection. 12 But I suffer not a woman to teache, neither to vsurpe auctoritie ouer ye man, but to be in scilence. 13 For Adam was first fourmed, then Eue. 14 And Adam was not deceaued: but the woman beyng deceaued, was in the transgression. 15 Notwithstandyng through bearyng of chyldren she shalbe saued, yf they continue in fayth and loue, and holynesse, with modestie.

Citing this language at least allowed me to get off the hook, because it's clear that Christians have been selectively ignoring this passage for centuries. Preaching this passage in the 1550s was enough to get your ears whacked off, since for some reason Queens Mary and Elizabeth both took umbrage at the prohibition against their vsurping auctoritie over ye man. And if that weren't bad enough, in the 1590s it was pretty clear that Elizabeth was never going to saue herself through bearyng of chyldren. Damn, 'Postle Paul! You best not say that too loud!

So that allowed me to make a nice point about Spenser's anxieties of writing about women in authority and their sexualities, but I had to push it just a little further. Having a girlfriend in law school makes me more than usually attentive to legal arguments. I checked in with her on the logic of Paul's evaluation of Genesis: "If two people commit the same crime, but one is deceived into doing so and the other one is not, which one is more 'in the transgression'?"

It turns out that in the eyes of the law, as I half-suspected, Adam would be more culpable, having a greater mens rea, and that since, in American courts, at least, "fraud vitiates consent" (dig that crazy law-talk), Eve should have received a more lenient punishment than what she was actually saddled with -- the responsibility for original sin, centuries of inferiority complex, and, as Paul chipperly points out, the redeeming penance of labor pains.

I pointed out to my students that if the Garden of Eden had been in Wisconsin and, instead of Yahweh, a district court bench had caught the pair hastily sewing fig leaves, men would be redeeming themselves in childbirth today. Some of them laughed, but I swear at least one or two of the little buggers was jotting down notes to report me to David Horowitz as a liberal thought policeman.