quality, when they are correctly translated; and of passages that have been used to justify inequality wrongly, as appears when their translation and interpretation are investigated.
It is obvious, of course, that women have been treated badly, and as second-class citizens at best, throughout Western history. The question is whether such treatment existed because of Christianity or in spite of Christianity. Human beings generally find it almost impossible to distinguish between what they believe because of their religion and what they believe because of other aspects of their culture. One can easily imagine people somewhere saying, ôWe are Christians and we are headhunters; therefore Jesus must have taught the virtues of headhunting,ö and searching the scriptures to find justification for this belief. The argument here is that bigotry against women is morally on a par with headhunting; it is not part of the deposit of Christian faith.
One often sees arguments these days, especially from feminist scholars, that Jewish women were treated very badly in JesusÆ time. Other scholars, however, argue that Jewish women were treated quite well in comparison with women in the surrounding societies and that the restrictions on Jewish women were the result of a sexual prudishness that was affecting all of Jewish society. One can grant that prudishness can and often does restrict women more than men, but it is not the same as a bigotry against women as such.
One aspect of this prudishness was a custom, which was almost a taboo, that Jewish men in general, and observant Pharisaic men in particular (here let it be noted that there has been much scholarship, including work by Jewish scholars, e.g., Falk, indicating that Jesus certainly appeared to be an observant Pharisaic Rabbi in many ways), did not speak to even respectable strange women in public. (This custom reappeared among the Hasidim of the Baal Shem Tov.) According to the...