By Alicia D. Myers

Although mothers, as well as themes of motherhood, appear throughout the New Testament, male figures attract the most attention from biblical scholars. But as feminist and womanist scholars have shown, this male-focused lens has left much unnoticed, including mothers. While readers might be quick to note Jesus’ own mother, we overlook others, including those mentioned in the Gospels and later texts, as well as those invisible behind the texts in groups of gathered saints listening to these works.

In my new book, Blessed Among Women? Mothers and Motherhood in the New Testament I argue that when we remember the unavoidable fact that we are all “of woman born”—including early Christian authors—we begin to see the theological import of these characters and metaphors. Rather than an easy acceptance of all things maternal as mere ornamental flair for more “substantive” theological positions, the constructions of mothers and motherhood in the ancient Mediterranean world helps demonstrate not only developing Christianity’s ambivalence toward maternal presence and motifs, but also its inherently gendered presentations of salvation.

Leonardo da Vinci, “Madonna Litta” (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/blessed-among-women-9780190677084?cc=us&lang=en&)

My study begins by exploring the philosophical, theological, and medical constructions of women and female bodies in Greco-Roman era literature, Jewish as well as Greek and Roman. Though these are discrete categories today, they overlapped in the ancient world, primarily because they were considered part of knowledge a “good” man should have in order to live rightly in the world. All things perfect were thought to be “masculine,” reflecting order, logic, and virtue, particularly self-control (sōphrosyne). Of course, only male citizens, whole-bodied and of noble lineage, could aspire to true manhood, or perfection. According to Aristotle, the most masculine approaches the realm of the divine.

The construction of female bodies and women in such a context immediately renders them deficient; they are not male, are stunted physically and, therefore mentally and socially, such that they require governance from men. Their very physical composition is presented as both deficient (lacking outward genitalia) and excessive (absorbing and then leaking extra fluid as menstrual blood or milk). When left to their own devices, as in the narratives of Pandora or later Hellenistic construals of Eve, women are destructive. Unable to exhibit masculine self-control, they wreak havoc on proper (that is, masculine) order through their insatiable greed, leading most problematically to illegitimate children.

In this context, then, women must be controlled by men, who will curtail their female excesses by facilitating the purpose (telos) of female existence; namely, motherhood. When a woman becomes a mother, she physically manifests her submission to her husband (or master), and her excess fluids are tempered and ordered by the masculinizing force of male semen, thus giving birth to legitimate life that sustains the status quo rather than undermining it.

Nicolas Régnier, “Allegory of Vanity (Pandora)” (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pandora#/media/File:Nicolas_R%C3%A9gnier_-_Allegory_of_Vanity_(Pandora).JPG)

But with their apocalyptic outlook and unique understandings of Jesus, the New Testament writings offered a view on the world different than the majority of Greco-Roman culture. Even though early Christian authors retain the assumption that perfection is masculine, like other minority groups they offer their own interpretation of what true masculinity looks like. In the case of Christians, this ideal is shaped by their presentations of Jesus as God’s suffering Christ and Son. With this reshaping of masculinity, early Jesus-believers also had to reshape their feminine ideals as well. With perfection—salvation and masculinization—now completed by means of Christ there was less urgency placed on reproduction, and therefore, on motherhood. With the advent of Christ, early Christian communities wrestled with the possibility that even women could find their telos without motherhood thanks to the Mother Christ and Mother Apostles.

Bible moralisée: The Birth of Ecclesia (http://www.artway.eu/content.php?id=2438&lang=en&action=show)

In the Gospels and Acts, for example, biological motherhood is no longer presented as the automatic telos for women. Rather, along with male disciples, female audience members are encouraged to become “like children” or are made “children of God,” being begotten or born anew by means of the Father’s will through Jesus (Mark 10:15; John 1:12–13). Thus, even though we learn of Mary and her role in Jesus’ miraculous conception and birth in Matthew and Luke, her role is diminished later in these same gospels, and significantly down-played or used as a foil for Jesus’ relationship to his heavenly Father in Mark and John. In Luke, for example, Mary is blessed not just as a “womb that bore and breasts that nursed” Jesus, but rather because she (and not just her constituent body parts) “heard the word of God and obey[ed]” (11:27–28). Even though Mary’s hearing of this “word” resulted in her literal conception of the child, Jesus, later women are not necessarily called to a similar end. They, like the male disciples, are to hear and obey, regardless of what God’s “word” might instruct.

Leonardo da Vinci, “The Annunciation” (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Da_Vinci_The_Annunciation.jpg)

A number of epistles also diminish biological motherhood, even as they utilize maternal metaphors to create family-like relationships among early Christians. In particular, the letters of Paul, Hebrews, and 1 Peter all employ breast-milk metaphors (1 Thess 2:7; 1 Cor 3:1–3; Heb 5:12–14; 1 Pet 2:2–3). By reminding their audiences that they have been formed from the same “milk” provided by their teachers, these communities are shaped to reflect their teacher as well as the one who inseminated him, causing him to metaphorically bear and lactate (cf. Gal 4:19–21). Rather than turning to actual maternal bodies, these New Testament writings demonstrate a shift toward male bodies metaphorically overtaking the role of actual mothers. Inseminated by the heavenly Father’s word, these new mothers convey eternal, rather than mortal, life.

Detail from the sarcophagus of Marcus Cornelius Statius, mother breastfeeding infant (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=ancient+Roman+breastfeeding&title=Special:Search&go=Go&searchToken=b8wtv7xgk1vd5e85sv075thh8#/media/File:Sarcophagus_Marcus_Cornelius_Statius_Louvre_Ma659_n1.jpg)

What all this meant for actual women disciples in early Christian communities is difficult to determine with precision. Nevertheless, it is clear from these and other writings, including the household codes, Pastoral letters, and apocryphal stories, that the role of motherhood in the masculinization—or salvation—of women was a topic of debate. Rather than assuming all women would become mothers, these writings either had to argue for such a telos (compare 1 Tim 2:15) or presented women who actively resisted the maternal ideal, rejecting fathers, husbands, and masters in order to submit to the counter-cultural word of God.

St. Thecla (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Saint_Thecla_and_the_Wild_Beasts%2C_probably_from_Egypt%2C_5th_century_CE_-_Nelson-Atkins_Museum_of_Art_-_DSC08279.JPG)

The constructions and roles of mothers and motherhood in early and developing Christianity is not, therefore, a niche topic only to be explored by a few. Rather, these depictions affect a number of theological aspects of early Christian writings including Christology, the nature of the Holy Spirit, the nature and structure of the Church, and, of course, the nature of salvation. This is because, as much as we might overlook them, our bodies impact the theologies we perceive and construct; our bodies, like ancient ones, not only provide metaphors by means of which we interpret divine happenings in our midst, but they are the means of our experiences of the divine as well. This is ever more the case for a developing faith that came to claim that its Savior became flesh, and was therefore conceived, gestated, born, and fed by a mother, just like the rest of us.

Alicia D. Myers is Assistant Professor of New Testament & Greek at Campbell University Divinity School.