Jesus (& Simon Magus) as Feminist
Despite such obstacles past and present, our authors go on to explain the survival of goddess worship within the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the process, they take us on a geographical odyssey from Judah to Alexandria and then to Samaria illustrating how recognition of the sacred feminine was advanced not only by the "proto-feminist" Jesus of Nazareth, but by two unexpectedly key figures: the arch-heretic Simon Magus (i.e. Simon the Magician) and John the Baptist.
As just indicated, even the best efforts of its scribal menfolk, could not keep goddess worship out of Judah's public consciousness. Without honoring her actual name, popular pressure evidently forced the patriarchs to somehow acknowledge Ashera's identity and influence. That pressure was increased by the spread of Greek (Hellenistic) culture especially as it emanated from Alexandria where fully 1/3 of the population was Jewish. (Greek culture was far more woman-friendly than its Jewish counterpart.)
Accordingly, as evidenced in the Book of Wisdom (produced at the end of the 3rd century BCE), the sacred feminine resurfaced under the title Sophia, a de-sexualized, sanitized, domesticated and abstract female principle called "Wisdom" and portrayed as God's First Thought his co-creator of the universe.
For its part, Samaria also proved central to the preservation of goddess traditions. Contrary to the impression given in the canonical gospels, the region was not a minor, out-of-the-way location. Instead, it covered a major swath of territory in northern Israel which was always more prosperous than its southern neighbor. The opposite impression comes from the anti-Israel and pro-Judah bias of the Jewish Testament in general and from a similar prejudice against Samaria itself in Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.
In any case, Samaria played a major role in Jesus' public life as did its inhabitants. Scandalously, a Samaritan emerged as the hero of one of Jesus' most famous parables. Additionally, according to John's Gospel, Jesus made his first public declaration of his messianic identity to a Samaritan woman.
John the Baptist had Samaritan connections too. So did Simon Magus, who (as we'll see presently) was both a disciple and rival of Jesus. And since Simon as well as Jesus were disciples of John, and since both of them ended up centralizing devotion to flesh-and-blood embodiments of Sophia, it makes sense to attribute similar focus to the Baptist.
In fact, all three Jesus, John the Baptist and Simon the Magician had equal first century claims to the title of Christ or Messiah. (Well into the second century, John's disciples invoked Jesus' own praise of their master as "the greatest prophet" to argue John's superiority to Jesus.) It's therefore a fluke of history that today's "Christians" are not Johannites or Simonists.
As for Simon Magus . . . Christian polemic portrays him as a contemptuous minor figure not only in Luke's Acts of the Apostles but throughout early Christian tradition. However, historically speaking, he himself was widely revered as the Son of God. He was a wonder worker on a par with his Nazarene rival. Both men presented themselves as prophets of Sophia. Both were besotted with women who for them embodied God's Wisdom complete with all the sexual overtones reminiscent of goddess worship everywhere.
The latter is most evident in the case of Simon, a free thinker who, like Jesus, rejected the group consensus of his own time in favor of the Wisdom of God. Simon's Sophia went by the name Helen whom he portrayed as God's First Thought. She was a former prostitute whose status as such, Simon argued, incarnated the patriarchy's degrading treatment of women in general. Accessing Helen's wisdom involved daily sexual relations with the beloved.
Jesus' relations with his own Sophia, Mary Magdalen, mirrored that of Simon the Magician. Clearly his favorite, Mary was Jesus' link with his many female disciples. She was probably his sexual consort if not his wife and mother of his children. (It was simply a given, the authors argue, that any Jewish man above 20 years of age had to be married. So, at the age portrayed in the gospels, Jesus was either a widower or a divorcee.)
At the same time, Mary Magdalene was a rival of Peter the apostle who according to Magdalene's Gospel and other recently discovered texts was an extreme misogynist and enemy of the one Jesus saw as the embodiment of the divine feminine God's First Thought. Jesus' identification of Mary as "the apostle of apostles" wounded Peter to the quick.
All of this has evident implications not only for questions about the sacred feminine in general, about goddess worship and church leadership, but also for "the contemporary rise of the sacred feminine in the Judeo-Christian tradition" and for restoring balance in our increasingly troubled world.
Conclusion
Reading When God Had A Wife was like taking a short course in biblical studies. Thankfully, it recalled for me what I had learned more than half a century ago in the most important courses I took in preparation for priestly ordination in the Catholic seminary. And that recollection made me wonder why the knowledge communicated in When God Had A Wife has not yet filtered down to those who occupy the pews in churches and synagogues, and prayer mats in mosques.
It's as if there were some conspiracy to keep everyone ignorant, naà ¯ve and childish in their approach to faith. For instance, our authors reminded me that in the seminary well more than 50 years ago, I had learned about text criticism, form criticism and redaction criticism. I wonder why all of that isn't common knowledge.
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