Concerning the struggle of the early church against extreme forms of asceticism, author Gary Taylor provides the following important background information:
Most important, the [Dead Sea] scrolls confirm the testimony of ancient historians that a radical hostility to human sexuality was one feature of sectarian Judaism in the Palestine Jesus inhabited. Many scholars believe that the Qumran community was celibate; certainly, they prohibited sexual intercourse anywhere in Jerusalem. The first-century Jewish historian Josephus reported that members of the Essene sect “disdain marriage,” and that in order to maintain their numbers they were forced to “adopt other men’s children.” This claim is confirmed by another contemporary, Philo of Alexandria (“They eschew marriage…. No Essene takes a wife”), and by Pliny the Elder (“it has no women and has renounced all sexual desire,” creating “a race in which no one is born”). Like some of their Jewish contemporaries, some early Christians believed that all “sexual intercourse is polluted.”
“Woe unto you,” says the Book of Thomas the Contender, “who love intimacy with womankind and polluted intercourse with them! Woe unto you who are gripped by the authorities of your body!” (144:8-11). “It is fitting to mortify the flesh,” says the Gospel according to Philip (82:28). In the Gospel according to Thomas, Jesus is said to have said, “If you do not abstain from the world you will not find the kingdom” (27) and “Woe to the soul that depends on the flesh” (112).
Some of these Gospels were eventually dismissed as apocryphal, some of these views dismissed as heretical; the Church did everything it could to reduce the proliferating Christianities of the first centuries to a single official genus. Most believers contracted and consummated marriages, lived in the world, depended on the flesh. Nevertheless, as Peter Brown and Susanna Elm have comprehensively demonstrated, permanent sexual renunciation and lifelong virginity were profoundly important values in the first centuries of Christianity. In the eastern Mediterranean world that Jesus knew and helped to shape, a radical rejection of human genitality was certainly imaginable. Philo of Alexandria, in a lost work, allegedly asserted, “It is better to eunuchize yourself than to rage madly for unlawful sexual intercourse.” The works of Philo were widely read by second century Christians, as were the Maxims of Sextus; Sextus urged readers to “cast away every part of the body that misleads you to a lack of self-control, since it is better for you to live without the part in self-control than to live with it to your peril.” It’s a short step from abstinence to amputation. [Taylor, G. (2002). Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood. NY, New York: Routledge.]
Why am I writing about radical asceticism in the early church on a blog about women’s equality?
Because this appears to be the actual focus of Paul’s concern in his first letter to Timothy; and I believe it is of paramount importance that we understand this context if we are to correctly understand his letter.
In 1st Timothy 1:3-4, Paul warns against false teachers who devoted themselves to myths and endless genealogies. They claimed to be teachers of the law, but did not know what they were talking about (1 Timothy 1:7). They taught a doctrine of asceticism that vilified the body and its passions; followers had to abstain from marriage and the eating of certain foods (1 Timothy 4:3). Paul refers to this teaching as demonic (1 Timothy 4:1), and he encourages Timothy to guard the gospel against opposing ideas that are falsely called “gnosis,” meaning knowledge (1 Timothy 6:20).
Ascetic Jewish communities claimed that their teaching authority came through their study of “endless genealogies.” They taught that the body must be renounced through continual fasting from various foods and through celibacy. Their renunciation of the body allegedly gave them access to special revelation knowledge (gnosis) from God. To demonstrate to themselves and others that they had embraced this radical renunciation of “the flesh” they insisted upon circumcision for all male adherents (c.f. B. Edwards, Let My People Go: A Call to End the Oppression of Women in the Church, Revised and Expanded). Philo of Alexandria, in praise of ascetic Jewish communities in Egypt, compared them to the sexless attendants of the mythological goddess Cybele (c.f. Philo, “On the Contemplative Life”).
In the early church, a similar radical renunciation of the body—and especially sexuality—was also taught. It was symbolized not through circumcision, but rather through ritual castration. In the following comments, author Daniel Caner attempts to highlight the pervasive nature of this practice:
In his Apology Justin martyr tells how a young man in Alexandria petitioned the Roman prefect for permission to be castrated. Permission was denied, but Justin’s apologetical use and evident approval of the effort itself are striking. The youth intended, so Justin writes, to persuade non-Christians that sexual promiscuity was not a secret rite…among Christians, and he cites the incident to demonstrate that some Christians forgo marriage altogether and live completely in continence [sexual abstinence].
Written in the middle of the second century c.e., this is the earliest documentation of the impulse exhibited by certain early Christians towards self-castration as an expression of Christian Chastity. Two centuries later Basil of Ancyra devoted several sections of his treatise On the True Integrity of Virginity (ca. 335-58) to the same practice. Unlike Justin, however, Basil hardly considers this evidence of a man’s continence: on the contrary, those who “perversely” castrate themselves “by this very deed make a declaration of their own licentiousness….” [His thinking was that those who castrated themselves remained slaves of lust in their hearts.]
The practice and prohibition of self-castration in early Christianity has only received passing historical notice in conjunction with studies of the interpretation of Matthew 19:12 [where Jesus talks about eunuchs] or the debate over Origen’s alleged self-castration. These studies, like the orthodox treatises from which the evidence must be drawn, tend to marginalize self-castration as a rare act on the “lunatic fringe” of early Christian asceticism. Their view needs modification. Though testimony is scanty, sources from the fourth century indicate that by then self-castration had become a real problem in the nascent Church. Basil, for example, excuses his discussion of it by asserting a need to “check the many such eunuchs” who had “already grown prominent in the Church.” A more general concern appears in the Nicaean Canons and the so-called Apostolic Constitutions which contain statutes against self-made eunuchs both among the laity and the clergy. The authors of these canons perceived self-castration as an indication of certain Christian teachings they deemed heretical. This paper argues instead that self-castration should be viewed more generally as a practice of early Christians who, prompted by their understanding of Matthew 19:12 and other influences (not necessarily by alliance to a heretical group), embraced radical corporeal asceticism as a fundamental part of Christian devotion….
Eunuchs were no new breed to the Roman empire of the Christian era. Castration had long been the physical mark of slavery (of slaves brought in from outside the empire) and of religious devotion in the so-called oriental cults. Although Domitian and Nerva had banned castration within the borders of the empire and Hadrian had made it a capital offense for both castrator and castrated…the practice continued, as it had for hundreds of years, among the “Galli” priests and devotees of Cybele (Magna Mater), Atargatis and the Scythian goddess….
Basil, writing near Phrygia suggests the affinity of Christians who castrate themselves with the “Greeks in the past,” i.e., the Galli of the region, [the self-emasculated priests of Cybele].
Self-castration became associated with the “dualist” doctrines espoused by Marcion, Tatian et al., which tended to denigrate the body as the nagging link between the human soul and the evils they believed inherent in the material world.
Epiphanius of Salamis observed by 377 that “not a few” monks in Egypt had “dared to make themselves eunuchs.” He described one Transjordanian sect, the Valesians, who “are all castrated except for a few…when they take someone as a disciple, as long as he has not yet been castrated he does not partake of animal flesh. But once they have persuaded or forced him to be castrated, then he partakes of anything whatsoever…. They not merely discipline their own this way, but often impose the same on strangers passing through, entertained by them as guests.” Ephiphanius adds that “most of these Valesians had been in the Church up to a certain time, until their madness spread, and they were expelled.” Thirteen years later John Chrysostom inveighed against those who had mutilated themselves around Antioch.
The practice of self-castration thus persisted despite its condemnation in early Church regulations. Both the Council of Nicaea (canon 1, 325) and the authors of the Apostolic Constitutions (canons 22-24, drawn up perhaps at Antioch, ca. 380) banned such men from entering the clergy; the latter also punished the laity who castrated themselves with three years’ excommunication. [Caner, D. (Nov., 1997). The Practice and Prohibition of Castration in Early Christianity, Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 51 No. 4, pp. 396-415. BRILL. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1583869]
If self-castration was such a widespread symbol of radical asceticism in the early church, why doesn’t Paul prohibit it in his first letter to Timothy?
He probably does.
In the first century A.D., throughout the Roman Empire, castration was prohibited as a form of murder, under the Legis Corneliae de sicariis et veneficis: The Law of Cornelius Sylla against murderers and poisoners.
Under Sylla, those who castrated themselves or others were exiled and would forfeit rights to all property. Later under Hadrian, the crime of self-castration was punishable by death. [Gaii Institutionum Iuris Civilis Commentarii Quatuor, Gaius, trans. Edward Poste, London, Oxford at the Clarendon Press. M.A., M.DCCC.LXXV]
Why was castration viewed by Roman law as a form of murder? Possibly because their understanding of human reproduction was taken largely from the philosophy of Aristotle, who viewed male “seed” as containing the human soul, while the “matter” (i.e. soil) that became the soul’s body was provided by the woman:
The semen from the male is the cause of the offspring (Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, Book 1 chapter 20).
While the body is from the female, it is the soul that is from the male (Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, Book 2 chapter 4).
Since the embryo is already potentially an animal but an imperfect one, it must obtain its nourishment from elsewhere; accordingly it makes use of the uterus and the mother, as a plant does of the earth (Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, Book 2, Chapter 4).
The Roman philosopher Cicero said that “If Plato’s prose was silver, Aristotle’s was a flowing river of gold” [http://www.history.com/topics/ancient-history/aristotle].
According to this prevailing Roman worldview, to castrate a man was to murder his offspring.
That may all be morbidly interesting, but where in 1 Timothy does Paul ever allude to the murdering of a man’s offspring?
In Psalm 106, we read the following horrifying story of Israel’s idolatry in the land of Canaan:
They worshiped their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons. They shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, and the land was desecrated by their blood. (36-38, TNIV)
The story of the Canaanites’ original idolatry can be found in Greek, in a book of the Septuagint known as “The Wisdom of Solomon”:
They practiced magic and conducted unholy worship: they killed children without mercy and ate the flesh and blood of human beings. They were initiated into secret rituals, in which parents murdered their own defenseless children. (12:4-6)
The parents who murdered their own offspring are referred to in the Greek text as “authentas.”
In 1st Timothy 2:12, Paul prohibits something he refers to as “authentein.” He prohibits this alongside a form of teaching (“didaskein”). It is entirely possible that he is prohibiting the teaching (didaskein) of extreme asceticism that was universally symbolized by the practice of “authentein andros”: ritual violence against a man, which was viewed by Roman law as murder.
To make the significance of Paul’s word choice (authentein) more apparent, it may help to point out that the Roman law against “sicariis“–if written in the Greek of the Septuagint–would be the law against “authentas.” “Sicariis” is Latin for “murderers.” According to Hippolytus of Rome, “Sicarii” was also the name given to a sub-sect of Jewish ascetics who forcibly circumcised–and sometimes killed–Gentile men (The Refutation of All Heresies, Book IX, Chapter XXI).
But doesn’t “authentein” mean “to exercise [usurp or assume] authority”? In 1 Timothy 2:12, wasn’t Paul prohibiting women from wrongfully taking authority from a man?
Probably not.
In the Wisdom of Solomon, “authentas” refers to “murderers.” In Polybius Histories, “authentes” refers to a man who “perpetrated a massacre.” In the Histories of Diodorus Siculus, “authentas” refers to those who “support a violent attack” on the Roman Senate and carry out the “murder” of the Senate guard. In fact, in a study completed by Leland Wilshire of 329 instances of the use of some form of “authentein” in ancient Greek literature, most of those examples through the New Testament era referred to someone who committed or supported a violent crime, usually murder. [Wilshire, L. (2010). Insight Into Two Biblical Passages. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America]
In 1 Timothy 2:12, why would Paul prohibit “a woman” from teaching a radical form of asceticism that was almost universally symbolized by ritual castration? You may recall from earlier paragraphs that radical asceticism in the church allegedly drew inspiration from mythology connected with the “oriental cults”; especially the cult of the goddess Cybele. The Cybele cult was traditionally dominated by women. Anyone in Ephesus blending the gospel with this mythology was likely to be “a woman.” (c.f. Apostle’s Warning: Restoring Paul’s Original Message in his First Letter to Timothy)
How then did “authentein” ever become associated with a woman “exercising, usurping or assuming authority” over a man? I believe the writings of John Chrysostom provide an important clue. As mentioned in an earlier paragraph, Chrysostom did take a very vocal stand against the practice of ritual castration in the church. He was not, however, particularly worried about asceticism. He knew that castration had been viewed as murder under Roman law, but this was not his main concern either. His problem with eunuchs was that “They are dominated by women, gynaikodouloi. They are…soft, effeminate, irrational, and slavish.” [De Wet, C. (2015). Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity, Oakland California , University of California Press, P. 267]. And so, a practice that symbolized extreme asceticism in the early church, and was referred to by Roman law as a form of murder, was criticized by John Chrysostom–one of Christianity’s earliest patriarchal theologians–as making men into the slaves of women.
In their book entitled, “I Suffer Not a Woman,” authors Richard and Catherine Clark Kroeger (1992) also highlight that ritual castration was viewed by some as a direct undermining of male authority:
One other aspect of sex reversal is worthy of mention. This is the reversal experienced by men who castrated themselves in the service of the mother goddesses, most notably Cybele, the Syrian Goddess, and Artemis of Ephesus. Ritual castration was specifically called “depriving of power.” Those who had sacrificed their manhood were said to have been transformed into women and thereafter were considered feminine. (p. 94)
In spite of John Chrysostom’s perspective—and the emerging tradition against female authority in the church–I believe that in prohibiting “teaching” (didaskein) alongside “authentein andros” in 1 Timothy 2:12, Paul was warning that the gospel of Jesus Christ must not become confused with a radical asceticism that was almost universally symbolized by the ritual castration of men.
Apostle's Warning 