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INNER CIRCLE: Being Made Male?

INNER CIRCLE: Being Made Male?

Last updated on: January 24, 2025 at 6:51 pm by Keith Giles

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INNER CIRCLE: Being Made Male? 2025-01-24T18:51:12+00:00 Keith Giles

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Some translators of Mary’s Gospel render the passage in the Gospel of Mary above not as “…let us praise his greatness, for he has prepared us and made us humans,” but rather as Mary saying that Jesus has “made us male.”

If we accept this perspective of the text, what does it mean? Are we to believe that Mary is suggesting to the other disciples that Jesus made all of them – and her – male?!

One scholar suggests that ancient concepts of male and female were quite unlike ours today. In fact, our modern views of gender roles, egalitarianism and equality of the sexes might even prevent us from fully comprehending what is being communicated in many early Christian texts.

As scholar Blossom Stefaniw points out in her article, Becoming Men, Staying Women: Gender Ambivalence in Christian Apocryphal Texts and Contexts:

“There is no need to look for egalitarianism or feminism or even chauvinism in Apocryphal texts- these were not the categories in which the writers lived and wrote. Instead, a more basic task must first be performed, namely that of discovering some of the categories and assumptions which did inform these texts. This can be done by examining the motif of gender ambivalence and explicating the ideas and beliefs which motivate it.”[1]

“…One could object that ‘gender’ is just as anachronistic a category to use in interpreting the Apocrypha as are terms like feminism or chauvinism…I seek to employ this term in a flexible manner, taking account of the fact that ‘femaleness’ and ‘maleness’ had a different conceptual content in tire cultures under examination here.”[2]

Also, when it comes to examples where women are made male, we need to understand in what way this concept is intended to be understood:

“…The characterization of women as male or manly is here termed ‘gender ambivalence’ because, as will be seen, the individuals thus described are not portrayed as physically changing from one sex to another nor are they ever completely seen as having changed from one gender to the other socially. In this context it is certainly more accurate to speak of ambivalence than equality, because women who are said to have been made men or to have taken on manly attributes are not subsequently completely removed from the social category ‘woman’; they are seen, and treated, as men in some ways and as women in others, so that the issue of gender is never neutralized nor is a differentiation of status or authority permanently suspended.”[3]

In other words, being “made male” is not literally suggesting that a woman must be transformed into a man in order to become worthy of authority in the Christian community. If that were the case, then why would the other men mentioned in the Gospel of Mary need to be “made into men”? Aren’t they already male? Does Jesus need to make them even more male than they already are?

Stefaniw sees this phrase as a code for something based not in gender but in terms of accepted roles that ancient Christians understood as being inherently “male” or “female.” As she explains regarding Mary’s statement that Jesus has “made us male”:

“…Mary manifests a liminal role of gender ambivalence: on the one hand, she claims to have been made male (like the other disciples, the brethren) and takes this as a standard for her mentality in regard to spiritual things, but on the other hand she remains a woman socially inasmuch as her claim to authority is immediately negated and her only legitimacy comes through attachment to men. The Mary of this text is actively male and passively female, male in the way she acts and female in the way she is treated. Also, her ‘being made male’ is not absolute, conclusive, or consistent, so that in fact she has not really been made male, but only pushed into an ambivalent, paradoxical, liminal space, where both female and male categories are applied to the same individual, where male gender is (partially) attributed to her but female sex remains and influences the degree to which she is able to exercise spiritual authority within the group.”[4]

“So in this passage, we see the idea of a woman (and men as well) being made a man in the context of some manner of spiritual ideal but in the social context of a group, when it comes to questions of religious authority and leadership, Mary is again treated in a way that keeps her within the boundaries of femaleness. Here is a case of Mary staying a woman in terms of her social role, but becoming a man in terms of how her spiritual development is described…”[5]

“What we have been seeing in these texts is thus truly gender ambivalence and not gender transference, integration or neutralization, and if anything resembling equality was even potentially involved, none of this complicated gender-bookkeeping would be occurring at all.”[6]

So, being made a male in this context has less to do with gender and more to do with one’s role in a social environment. It’s more about who has spiritual authority and the assumption that men have it and women, sadly, do not. Therefore, Jesus has to make Mary – a woman – male in some esoteric way that allows her to operate as a male in this spiritual context. But this doesn’t make her male in any other way. She is still, at her core, a woman without equality in the company of men.

According to the general scientific community of the early Church, women and men were seen as nearly the same, except for a few minor differences in genitalia. As Stefaniw explains, “…a woman is almost a man, but not quite. A woman, biologically, is trying to be a man, but unfortunately has her reproductive organs on inside out. She is physically the same as a man, except in those strange areas where she diverts from the norm.”[7]

Being “made male”, then, is more about helping women to move closer to male perfection, and specifically, away from the physical realm and closer to the spiritual one, as women were seen as mainly useful for bearing children or sexual intercourse, and men had access to higher pursuits such as philosophy and religion.

Steaniw, once again, explains that “…women, by definition particularly physical and fleshly human beings, were in no fit state to be in positions of religious influence or authority (especially if they maintained female reproductive functions and the social roles of wife and mother), in a culture where the attainment of spiritual authority is closely associated with freedom from the body.”[8]

To our modern ears, all of this seems archaic, misogynistic and counter-intuitive. Not only does this not align with our assumptions about the differences between men and women, most of us today are more likely to assume that women are the more spiritually sensitive ones while the men are largely oblivious to such things.

Nevertheless, in a world where maleness was understood as a prerequisite for attaining spiritual wisdom and operating with spiritual authority, women had to overcome this assumption somehow, and the solution – as bizarre as it may sound to us today – was to re-classify certain women who exhibited unusual spiritual wisdom as male. Or, as Stefaniw says, “…the culture bent but did not break the assumption that women are not and cannot be spiritual beings, such that those individuals who gained spiritual respect were re-categorized as men. Whatever one may feel about the ethical value of this tendency, it was indeed an ingenious solution to the problem posed by women taking on spiritual authority.”[9]

[1] From the article, Becoming Men, Staying Women: Gender Ambivalence in Christian Apocryphal Texts and Contexts by Blossom Stefaniw, Sage Journals, April 14, 2010.

IBID

The newest book from Keith Giles, “The Quantum Sayings of Jesus: Decoding the Lost Gospel of Thomas” is available now on Amazon. Order HERE>

Keith Giles is the best-selling author of the Jesus Un series. He has appeared on CNN, USA Today, BuzzFeed, and John Fugelsang’s “Tell Me Everything.”

He co-hosts The Heretic Happy Hour Podcast and his solo podcast, Second Cup With Keith which are both available on Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Podbean or wherever you find your podcast fix.

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