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Apostles, Power, and Women’s Bodies

Introduction

While conversations about sexual ethics seem modern, early Christian texts like the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles include teachings about sex, too. Mallory Challis used the framework of human flourishing to discuss how early Christian narratives emphasized standards of sexual abstinence in ways similar and different to the modern Purity Movement. She looked at how the bodies of women in the ancient narratives were utilized as a means of spiritual flourishing for others, particularly for the apostles of Jesus. This analysis attempts to show how women’s bodies drive narratives by controlling the wills of surrounding characters, illuminating how their bodies find power, even as victims of violence and subjugation. Mallory focused on two ancient Christian stories about Peter’s disabled daughter and Drusiana and Kallimachos.

Texts:

The Acts of Peter (“The Coptic Fragment”)

The Acts of John (paragraphs 58-86)

Transcript

Click here for a printable transcript (pdf file, opens in a new tab).

Shirley Paulson

Oh, hi everybody, and welcome. So glad to see you again this evening. I want to welcome you to the July, 2024 Bible and Beyond Discussion. I’m your host, Shirley Paulson, and our guest scholar this evening is Mallory Challis. The title of our conversation this evening is “Apostles, Power, and Women’s Bodies.” And I want to give you a fair warning, and Mallory may explain more about this. It’s not a particularly easy topic tonight that we’re dealing with, but it is important for us to think about so that we don’t turn a blind eye to issues that need our attention. So, Mallory’s going to introduce us to two ancient Christian stories that demonstrate how women’s bodies were used as a means of spiritual flourishing for some of the apostles of Jesus. We’ll have Mallory explain a little about the challenges here.

If you decide that this just isn’t where you need to be this evening, you can duck out. It will be recorded though, so you can look at it later if you think that later might be a better time for you. Just wanting to give you a little heads-up on that. So let me just tell you about Mallory. She is a second year graduate student at Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity seeking ordination in the coming years. She’s currently serving as a pastoral intern at First Baptist on Fifth in Winston-Salem, NC, and frequently writes as a freelance journalist for Baptist News Global.

Mallory Challis

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Shirley, for the opportunity to give my presentation here and talk about research. I’m so excited to be among this community, but yeah, so these stories are tough stories to listen to and read about, and so I absolutely understand if some of you need to duck out or turn your volume down at any point during the presentation or the lecture. It’s not really a lecture, but these stories deal with sexual violence and attempted sexual abuse and the utilization of bodies in ways that in the modern day we of course know that this is immoral, but in these texts, these bodies were kind of used to think with and to imagine situations. I just wanted to give a content warning about that. I want to be conscientious of the experiences and the sensitivities to anyone in the room to stories like this because hard to talk about,

Shirley Paulson

But I appreciate your being willing to get us into the subject because it is a topic that I think needs attention and you’re a great one to do it for us. I appreciate that so much. And these are texts that we just don’t know that much about. We don’t talk about them enough. So that’s why I’m glad to get started here. So why don’t you now start us with maybe a little introduction to Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. Probably most Bible readers are familiar with the Acts of the Apostles. So you’re talking about something different. What are the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles?

Mallory Challis

Yeah, so the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles is a pretty large set of literature in early Christianity from sort of early Christianity to the late antiquity period. And these are not in the Bible. They’re not canonical, but they tell stories about Jesus and the apostles, and they sort of imitate the narrative style in the New Testament, but they’re not written by any of these characters that they claim to be written about. So the two stories that we’re talking about today are from the Act of Peter and the Acts of John, and they claim to be written by John and Peter, but they’re not really. They’re written by people that lived far after these apostles were dead. And we’re sort of imagining like, okay, these are the issues, the theological questions, the ethical questions that we have today in our time in Christian communities. What might the apostles in the Bible say about these questions? Let’s imagine a story of the apostles dealing with these questions and debates. They’re not historical narratives. There’s no evidence that these narratives are factually true, but they’re certainly informed by Christian history and by Christian experience throughout the early Christian period.

Shirley Paulson

So that’s going to get us into then why we would want to know this because it’s our history even if we don’t know much about it. So maybe you can help us to think about approximately what dates would they have been written and who might have written them if they weren’t Peter and John?

Mallory Challis

Absolutely. The dating of these texts, all the texts that I was dealing with in my research– of course there’s a huge body of literature, but they’re all from the early Christian to the late antiquity period. We’re talking about right after the life of Jesus. So anytime between probably the first century to the late third or early fourth century. The one hundreds to the three hundreds, specifically the Acts of Peter, we kind of have this pretty tight range of 160 CE to 170 CE. For the Acts of John, we know it’s a little bit later, we’re a little bit more iffy and squishy on that. We know it was no earlier than 190 CE, but it was likely revised soon after 200 CE just because of the way the stories are kind of chunked together throughout the narrative.

And one of the ways we kind of decide when these narratives were written, aside from aging of the papyrus that they were written on, are the language and the linguistic skills that the authors have is thinking about again what theological questions Christians were asking in these texts and what ethical questions these texts seem to deal with. And we can sort of track throughout the development of these texts. Okay, this heresy was happening at this time, and it comes up a lot in this book. It seems like this was written at the same time that this heresy was developing. It’s kind of cool we can kind of track the history of these theological debates. As far as the authorship, we really don’t know who wrote them. We know that they were early Christians who probably followed the teachings or really believed in the honor of these apostles. We can think of them as really dedicated followers of people like John and Peter, but they don’t name themselves. That’s kind of emblematic of this pseudepigraphal genre is what we call it. This idea of writing a text in the name of someone to think about how they might consider an issue, but not identifying yourself, because that wasn’t really the point. They weren’t trying to get famous from selling these texts or have honor from creating these texts. They were really just trying to think with these texts.

Shirley Paulson

You answered a question that I had in my mind all this time. I was wondering why would they be important to Christian scholarship? And I think your point then about the fact that you can tell their dating by what else was going on, this sort of helps us see better what’s going on with the whole history, that we should be aware of how things developed and why they became what they became. That’s kind of helpful. So then maybe let’s move on to the next thing then. You’ve been focusing on these two stories from the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. Why don’t we start with the Peter’s story? What happened in that one?

Mallory Challis

Yeah, so the story of Peter’s daughter is a really short narrative. It’s the Coptic fragment of a larger set of texts. It seems like it might’ve been an earlier writing, but we’re not really sure we’re kind of squishy on this date. The narrative begins as the apostle Peter is depicted healing a crowd of people. People are coming to him saying, I have a broken leg, I have leprosy, I have this and that. And he’s just kind of mystically healing them in this snappy way. But then a crowd member sees his daughter sitting sort of behind him in the narrative, visibly disabled, very physically disabled. The narrative says she has palsy. We’re not really sure what that means, but it’s something physical with her muscles or her bones. And so the crowd member says, Hey, why aren’t you healing your daughter? If you heal all these other people, why not this person that you love so much? And so Peter actually laughs at this man and kind of finds the question funny. I’m not neglecting my daughter. I’m choosing not to heal her, but because he wants to prove that it’s not a limitation of his power, he sort of heals her body and then unhealed her immediately as if to say, “Look, I can do this. I just chose not to.” And then he starts to tell the story of why she’s physically disabled.

Shirley Paulson

Just a second, Melanie, I think you skipped over this so fast. We may not register what you just said. You just said that she’s disabled and he says it is no big deal. He can heal her, and so he heals her and then he unhealed her. Is that what you said?

Mallory Challis

I did say that, yes.

Right, so this kind of sets up this apostolic theme of power that I wanted to get into of Peter is sort of utilizing this idea that he can heal people as an expression of, Hey, I’m a guy of power. You should trust me. I have the merit and the gusto to be your faith leader. But when these people start asking these questions about why aren’t you healing your daughter, he seems to feel like his ego is attacked a little bit. He seems to feel like he needs to prove, okay, I’m capable of healing her. It’s a choice that I’m not doing it.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, so now you tell us about the choice. I just want to make sure we heard you so go ahead.

Mallory Challis

Ahead, right? Yeah, yeah, I did speed past that. I apologize. But so after this instance of healing and nonhealing, he starts to explain to the crowd who is kind of amazed and confused at why he just did this. Oh, there’s a reason why she’s disabled. And so of course, in the early Christian world, this medical literature was not very well advanced. They didn’t know much about disability studies or why people became disabled. And so there is a mystical and social reason why this happened to her body. He explains that many were scandalized by her when she was about 10 years old. And he tells this story of a rich man in the community named Ptolemy. I think the translation that we used for this session used Ptolemaeus. Sometimes those Greek names get changed a little bit in different translations, but this is kind of an image of the Bathsheba narrative where David sees her bathing and wants to have sex with her and seeks her out.

This is pretty much the same thing. So Ptolemy sees 10-year-old Peter’s daughter and wants to have sex with her. He calls her over. Her mother is with her in this narrative, and she refuses. She says, no, my daughter is a child. You cannot have sex with her. But Ptolemy kidnaps her.

And this is at this point in the narrative, there’s a break. We’ve lost the leaf of narrative where we know kind of what happens, what goes down whenever Ptolemy and Peter’s daughter are alone, and scholars have different assumptions about what happens here. Some of them think that God paralyzed her to prevent him from sexually assaulting her. Some think that he abused her so much that she became disabled. We don’t know what happened because the leaf is for the people in power kind of conveniently missing.

But the story picks up when Peter and Peter’s wife, who is not named in the narrative and neither is his daughter, she doesn’t get a name, either find her paralyzed on the doorstep of Ptolemy’s house, and they bring her back home and kind of rejoice at the fact that she’s disabled because they view it as there’s a clear interpretation that she has been saved from sexual violence by being physically disabled.

So that’s the narrative of Peter’s disabled daughter.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah. Okay. So let’s see. Where do we go next from here? I mean, that’s interesting. Why don’t you tell us the other story and then you can tell us what we need to know from them, these two stories, why you picked these two. Tell us the other one now that we’ve got that one under our belts.

Mallory Challis

Absolutely. And I’ll pause here and just reiterate the content warning that I gave at the beginning. These narratives are tough to listen to. So again, if you need to check out, stop listening, please feel free to do so. This is hard work, hard things to listen to. But yes, so the second narrative is Drusiana and Callimachus from the acts of John. So Drusiana is this wealthy, elite kind of woman who chooses to be chaste because she wants it to be a spiritual decision. Even though she’s married, she decides, I don’t want to have sex anymore. I think it would be good for my faith. I think that this is how I’m going to attain spiritual flourishing. And she cuts herself off from any kind of sexual physical desire. But in this narrative, Calllimachus who is another man, he’s not her husband, continuously lusts after her.

I mean, he’s sending her letters. He’s telling her, I want to have sex with you. I you, I don’t care that you’re dedicated to chastity. And she becomes so overcome with sadness and shame over this, even though she hasn’t done anything, she becomes so overcome with grief that he is lusting after her, and that her body is sort of this source of temptation for him, that she wills herself to death because in her mind, death is better than potentially experiencing sexual violence from this man who will not stop making advances from her. But the story doesn’t stop there. She dies and her body is prepared, she’s entombed, and a funeral takes place. Her husband kind of takes care of all of that as a husband does. And the Apostle John is addressing believers, he’s preaching, he’s doing the funeral, kind of giving this message of hope in the midst of grief.

And while the funeral is taking place, Callimachus comes back, and he breaks into her tomb and he attempts to rape her posthumously. He’s mocking her dead body, and he’s saying, you thought that you could get away from me, but you’re not going to. But as he’s about to tear the cloth away from her body — he’s literally on the final cloth, I think, the text says a snake just magically appears in the tomb. It comes from nowhere, and it bites him, and it bites his accomplice, and they collapse on the ground and die. And John and Drusiana’s husband come back to the tomb to kind of check on the body a couple of days later, and they discover that the key’s missing, the tomb is opened. They enter and they see Callimachus, and he’s just lying on the floor dead. And so John raises Callilmachus from the dead to see what happened, and he immediately confesses, this is what I did.

Please forgive me. I want to attain spiritual salvation. I’m guilty. This was wrong. But then he starts to tell John this story of: “I was not able to commit this crime because the snake attacked me.” And then he says that some kind of mystical figure—in my translation, it says that the figure was attractive, but some kind of angelic figure—stood by her body and prevented him, prevented anything from happening to it. Once that crime started to be instigated, he then proclaims that he’s convicted in God and believes that John is a true apostle, and he would like to become a believer. But after this goes on, and this is where we can tell that Drusiana was an important woman in her community, because other believers and other people around start to beg for her to be raised from the dead. They’re angry that Callimachus was raised from the dead and not her. And so, John does that, and she rises from the dead and they tell her what happened. Look, this is what went down when you’re in the tomb, we’re sorry. And she is really excited that she’s been resurrected from the dead. She’s become sort of this spiritual being, too, in the narrative. She gets these mystical powers and she’s able actually to resurrect other people, and she becomes this apostolic figure at the end of the narrative of power, and mysticism, and these kind of things that we would describe as magical today.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, thank you, Mallory.

Mallory Challis

You’re welcome. I know that’s a lot.

Shirley Paulson

What we’re needing to digest here is maybe, first of all, it sounds preposterous to think that John and Peter just made somebody well and then sick and died and then raised somebody from the dead instantly and then not. This sounds like fantasy. What’s the point of writing this? I mean, it’s not meant to be history, so what is the point?

Mallory Challis

Right? Yeah. I think this question could be answered in so many different ways. When I was studying these texts, I was thinking through, okay, what is the point of the bodies of these women being utilized throughout these narratives? Why not some kind of theological discourse or the body of an animal or something else? Why are the bodies of these women being treated in this way? And so I think we can start here. We can think about this theme of sexual purity, that it’s obviously a trope in both of these stories.

Sexual sin seems to manifest in this idea of temptation, right? Ptolemy having temptation for Peter’s daughter, Callimachus having temptation for Drusiana. We can see this is one of the theological issues that was happening in the early church at this time. What do we do with sexual desire? What do we do with lust? Is this okay? They were seeking an answer that they seemed not to have found in the biblical text. And of course, the biblical canon doesn’t come for a long time, but whatever texts they had floating around, they seem not to have a clear answer or at least a clear consensus in their communities. What we do know about chastity, these choices of chastity, is that it was kind of an anomaly in ancient times. There was this heteronormative idea of you get married and you produce children, and that’s kind of just how it goes.

And that idea kind of transcends in our society today, but it was incredibly abnormal for a person, especially for a woman of a social class and social hierarchy standards. It was incredibly unique for a woman to be chaste and to not be desiring a marriage or engaging in sexual contact. And so this connection of chastity within these narratives is really interesting because they’re for Peter’s disabled daughter. She kind of doesn’t get to choose chastity. She’s kind of forced into it by being disabled. And disability in the ancient world was considered a reproductive issue sometimes. And so that’s another layer of the sexual purity piece of Peter who probably chose to allow her to continue to be disabled because she would not have a marriage mate if people thought that she was not able to produce children, because that was sort of a big piece of the value of women in this time.

Shirley Paulson

I wonder, could you help us understand, is there a difference between sexual chastity and sexual abstinence?

Mallory Challis

Oh, yes. Yes. There is a big difference. So sexual abstinence is a concept that a lot of us are probably really familiar with. It’s this choice to say no to sex for a specific period of time. We’re probably most familiar with it in the evangelical world, a choice to be chaste or a choice to be abstinent before marriage—saying no to sex until you meet a certain threshold of marriage. People also experience abstinence in fasting periods or other periods of their life where they just choose for this period of time I’m not going to have sex until I meet this threshold.

Chastity is different. Chastity is a choice to abstain from sex forever. It’s sort of a more permanent idea of I’m not going to do this because I don’t want to now and I don’t ever want to. This is why we often think of the phrase like “a vow to chastity” instead of just the spiritual practice of chastity because you vow your life to it.

Shirley Paulson

Well, then you talked about the vow of it. What does it mean then, in a Christian context, the idea of sexual chastity? Where does that fit into the Christian world?

Mallory Challis

Sure, sure. In the context of these narratives, we can think about Gnosticism as one of the big heresies that was developing at this time. So Gnosticism is a heresy that dictates that the body is bad, and the spirit is good. You want your being to be as little, the physical part of you, as possible, and as much the spiritual part of you as possible. And a way that people did this in the early church was by taking a vow of chastity by saying, I’m going to reject my physical body and the physical desires that my body has. Instead, I am going to choose to be a completely spiritual being. I’m going to seek pleasure and seek meaning in my life in the completely spiritual realm. I’m not going to follow what my body wants. People also did this in other ways of fasting, like fasting from food or fasting from clothing sometimes. So yeah, just sort of a rejection of the physical and an acceptance of the spiritual.

Shirley Paulson

Finding the relationship between the spiritual body, the material body, and the way the body functions. How would you say that virginity functions then as a source of subjugation or violence for women in the narrative? How does that work?

Mallory Challis

Right. I think we can think about the two different women in their particular contexts. For Peter’s disabled daughter, her state of virginity is kind of forced. It’s a punishment that’s instilled on her because of lust that someone else had for her. And when her body was sort of viewed as being this source of sexual temptation, that’s actually what Drusiana says about herself, this thing that is ruining the spiritual flourishing of her community. She is sort of subjugated to this state of virginity that’s forced and full of blame and shame, and she’s held responsible for in turn the spiritual wellbeing of everyone around her, specifically all the men around her who may potentially lust after her body and have sexual desires that were viewed in this narrative as un-Christian. We can also think of Peter’s unwillingness to heal her as sort of this perpetual punishment.

He’s taking her off the marriage market. He’s preventing her from even the possibility of choosing if she wants to be married or if she wants to engage in sexual contact with other people in positive ways. She is prevented from any kind of choice to engage in sexuality. I would say that that is a form of subjugation. She becomes this image of Peter’s ministry. He’s using her as this object of a lesson in his preaching and teaching and healing narratives. For Drusiana, I would kind of say a similar thing. She calls herself an object of temptation, and her body is perceived as of spiritual blame and of spiritual responsibility. Virginity kind of functions as protection from that.

But even within her narrative, she kind of is left with no choice but to sacrifice her own life despite being innocent for the sake of her own safety from sexual violence and abuse. And this in turn, her pursuit of virginity, which was at the beginning of the narrative of choice, but at the end of the narrative, sort of a means of survival becomes the means of spiritual flourishing for everyone around her. And she seems to express some autonomy, certainly more autonomy than Peter’s disabled daughter, but not enough autonomy because of course she’s being kind of thrown around and her body’s being used and imagined by the men in the narrative for the sake of objectification and lust and even spiritual edification.

Shirley Paulson

It’s just about time to turn it over to everybody else to start asking questions. But I have one more thing I’d like to just ask you about. You mentioned the spiritual flourishing for others. How does this help others flourish spiritually? And then we’ll go into other people questions.

Mallory Challis

We can think about this idea of Gnosticism again, of rejecting the body and only accepting the spiritual, which seems to be the big theological issue at work in these texts. And it’s very clear that the bodies of these women were viewed as sources of sin and sources of temptation, and it was their bodies that seemed to be blamed for any kind of sexual lust or sexual temptation or sexual violence that was happening. Even though I want to iterate that of course, no survivor or victim of sexual abuse is responsible for what happens to them, that certainly seems to be the way that these texts are interpreting their bodies. They become the sources of spiritual flourishing for the people in their community when they are subjugated into virginity, when they no longer are part of the marriage market, when they no longer are options for sexual lust. It kind of takes that sin off the table for everyone else in the community. By proxy of that subjugation, this perceived spiritual flourishing happens among the men who are lusting after them.

Shirley Paulson

The men.. . . sigh…  Okay. Wow. Well, I imagine that others have questions, and so we’re going to turn it over to the rest of you. While you’re thinking about this, I just, let me just ask you, would you say that Peter’s daughter and Drusiana experienced sexual violence, or how does that subjugation serve as a source of power or a willfulness?

Mallory Challis

Yeah, so I think these narratives are kind of wishy-washy about exactly what happens to the bodies of these women. It kind of skirts around the idea of sexual violence. But I think even amid this ambiguity with our modern understandings of ethics and autonomy and consent, I think that I would say that both of these women experienced some kind of sexual violence, even if it wasn’t what we imagine in the brutality kind of idea of it, because they were sort of forcibly controlled, their reproductive rights were forcibly controlled. And so I think that they were experiencing sexual violence just by proxy of not having power in their situations. But in terms of finding some meaning from these texts, sort of answering this question that a lot of people ask, why tell these stories? Why remember these stories? Why care about these stories, if they’re so scary and so terrible?

Why would we want to think about anybody experiencing some kind of violence? I think while we can talk about these narratives and use them as examples of injustice, which is certainly very important, we can also think about the willfulness of their bodies. When I was doing this research, I used Sarah Ahmed’s willfulness theory about thinking through the bodies of survivors and the experiences of survivors as stories of survivorship who fight in their complex structures. And even though they experience abuse, they get out on the other side, and they make it, and they are remembered. I think one way that we can think about these narratives is in conjunction with modern stories of survivors that we tell all the time in the news. I’m constantly reporting on BNG (Baptist News Global) stories of sexual violence and survivorship. We remember these things in the public sphere, and we often think of violence in the theoretical realm as overcoming a person and being this brutal thing that ruins your life.

But when survivors tell their stories, and when we listen to survivors, we can kind of see how they’re using their voices to fight for justice. They’re using their voices to Sarah Ahmed uses this image of a dead person that was like resurrected from life, pushing her hand up from the ground and saying, I’m still here. Listen to me. I have more to my story than this. We can listen to the stories of survivors in the sense of acknowledging that this violence is wrong and unfair and an injustice that happens in our world and has happened for centuries, but that it is something that we can fight against and one day live again in peace and in hope that life gets better and that we are not overcome. We do not become defined by these things that have happened to us and these things that have happened in our world. I actually have an art piece that I wanted to show. If I have time…

Shirley Paulson

Why don’t we go through some questions that have been piling up here, and then we’ll come back to your art. I’d love to see it. Absolutely. In the chat: is chastity sometimes a form of cultural rebellion wrapped in religion from a faith perspective standing up for integrity or human dignity, equality, a thwarting of power over?

Mallory Challis

Absolutely. I think we can think about chastity as a kind of push against the heteronormative, and I don’t necessarily mean the heteronormative as the nuclear family, but as just this expectation that you are supposed to get married and have children, and that is the purpose of your body. That is the purpose of you being, existing on earth. Chastity is certainly when it’s made as a choice that’s autonomous. It’s certainly a rebellion against just the expectations that the world has for you that sometimes Christian culture has for us. And it’s this elevation of your own—Gnostics would say—an elevation of your own spiritual being. But I think modern Christians would say it’s an elevation of your own autonomy and your own choice to say, no, I’m not going to let this physical desire or sexual world control me. I’m just going to say I’m going to be me, and my body is enough for just me. I think that’s a really great question, and I absolutely think that it could be sort of a rebellious kind of idea.

Shirley Paulson

I want to come to Toto and Grace, but there’s a question I think we should also ask in the chat that you could probably answer quickly. Susan is asking, it would help to know what was normal sexual behavior at that time, normal marriage at that time.

Mallory Challis

Yeah, so that’s a really great question. Normal sexual behavior in this sort of early Christian period, late antiquity was not like the sexual behavior that people kind of engage in today in the world. There wasn’t a sense of, I’m going to have sex with someone because I enjoy it, or I want to have sex with someone because I love them. Either it was more of a social exchange or an economic exchange. Often in marriage, it was this exchange of power and choosing the right person to partner with, choosing the right person to associate yourself with, instead of how today we choose people because we love them sometimes despite the social look of it or the discrimination that we might receive because we love that person. A biblical example of is Ruth and Boaz. We see this really economic exchange in their marriage of Ruth being this poor widowed woman who cannot provide for herself and Boaz being one the next of kin who is responsible for marrying her to a wealthy man who could provide for her. So they get married and they partner because it’s a social exchange that benefits both of them. Ruth is getting provided for, and Boaz is lauded for doing his social duty of marrying his next of kin who was widowed. So that’s kind of a glimpse into how sexuality and relationships functioned.

Shirley Paulson

That’s really interesting. Thanks for answering that. Okay. Toto, thanks for waiting there. It’s your turn.

Toto

Hi, thank you. I think my question kind of goes along that same line of thinking, because I was curious how much has to do with the timing, the period in between? What I was thinking was in Jewish tradition and even in Roman practice, women were more social—more of a property. They were treated as property. But in early Christianity, you kind of see what we were talking about with Mary Magdalene and some of the women in the early church. We see this autonomy rising—before it gets squashed again by orthodoxy or by St. Jerome and even Augustine and everything, when we start seeing women losing their autonomy again.

Mallory Challis

I don’t know if I could give you sort of a timeline about that autonomy apart from what you’ve kind of named as the Jewish traditions to the Roman Empire. But I do think that you bring up a good point, that perhaps these texts were a response to women choosing to be autonomous with their bodies and male writers of these texts wondering what to do with that and asking these questions like, “Hey, these women are saying that they want to be chaste. These women are saying that they don’t want to have sex with me. These women are not listening and subjugating themselves to me. What would the apostle say about this? What do I do when my authority is no longer my authority?” I certainly think that you bring up this great point of a timeline of autonomy growing because there’s so many stories. I mean, these are just two of them. There’re so many stories of women experiencing similar things where they want to be willful, they want to be autonomous, and they’re met with this patriarchal society that says no, but they’re so willful that their stories get remembered and their stories got written down. And we still talk about them today in Bible and Beyond discussions.

Shirley Paulson

Very interesting. Thank you. And Joy…

Joy

I’m backing up. You asked her about spiritual flourishing and Mallory talked about it, but I do not, I don’t have a definition for ‘spiritual flourishing.’ You’re commenting and talking about it, but I don’t get it. What is it?

Mallory Challis

Yeah, that’s a really good question and a term that I probably should have defined. I define it in my paper and my research. The definition that I used was written by a psychologist named Tyler VanderWeele, who actually studies human flourishing as his whole career. And he defines human flourishing in this very broad sense of a way when your life is good, and there’s different activities for human flourishing, that he studies in his psychological research. You can do journaling, you can take walks, you can be social, you can go to church, finding things that you can do that make your life good and increase measurable levels of things like happiness, self-esteem, sleep levels, things that you can do, a practice that you can do that improves your quality of life. And it’s very individualized. Nobody flourishes in the same way.

I used this research to be a sort of framework for how I look at these stories, because I was kind of thinking of these efforts of chastity and this practice of virginity, in particular, as an idea of flourishing, of what Christians in this time period thought. And Christians, still today, believe that if I am a virgin, if I am chaste, if I choose this virginal or chaste lifestyle, I will have a good life. I will reap spiritual or social rewards from this. We can see in the narratives there are spiritual rewards, especially for someone like Drusiana who at the end of her narrative becomes this apostolic mystical figure who is seemingly very close to God because she has remained chaste throughout the narrative.

It seems like that was considered or at least talked about as a means of what I would call flourishing of making your life feel good. Does that make sense?

Joy

Okay. Here’s what I would say, in short: flourishing or a spiritual flourishing is something that you term as a spiritual stand you take, because it’s going to make your life better. Is it a real personal kind of thing that way?

Mallory Challis

Yeah. Tyler VanderWeele talks about this in his research. He calls these activities for flourishing, and he essentially says that every person has to find their activity for flourishing and decide what activities am I going to do that are going to improve my quality of life? And it seems like in these texts, the idea of virginity as a means of spiritual flourishing was very popular. But we can think about modern examples today of I might find flourishing, in my lifestyle, when I take a walk every day, but someone else might not. Someone else might like to journal every day. Someone else might like to do both of those things. It becomes very individualized because people are different.

Joy

So you’re saying someone who believes that they will be a better person because they go to church every Sunday is practicing spiritual flourishing?

Mallory Challis

Yes. They’re engaging in active, spiritual flourishing that they believe is going to make their life good. And Tyler VanderWeele actually studies the church a lot in his research, and he compares Christians who smoke and Christians who don’t smoke, Christians who drink, and Christians who don’t drink, Christians who go to Sunday school, Christians who don’t. And they’re experiencing varying levels of flourishing, depending on how active they are in their church and how much they like it. One of the issues at hand in these texts and in our interpretation of them is if you can have a corporate decide for you or decided on behalf of an entire community that this is an act of flourishing for all of us? We can think of sexual purity or virginity as a more corporate activity for flourishing in that oftentimes Christians want to establish that as a standard for everyone and say, listen, this is what’s going to make you experience spiritual flourishing. But research has kind of shown that that’s not always true across the board. Thank you.

Shirley Paulson

You’re welcome. I appreciate this line of questioning, Joy. It seems like you’re getting into a question of morality—if you’re moral then you flourish. Or is it just the activities that make you think that you’re going to be happy? Where is the judgment as to what is going to make you flourish spiritually? Is it the corporate rule or is it your personal rule?

Mallory Challis

Morality is a big discussion in this research, and again, it becomes personalized for what it means for you to have a good life. But yeah, so in very simple terms, spiritual flourishing or flourishing in general. Tyler VanderWeele would use the phrase, human flourishing is when you’re happy, when you’re well fed, when you sleep well, when you have good self-esteem, those basic, measurable things that you can say. Okay, someone just typed in the chat, the word fulfillment. That’s a really good word. Thank you for typing that in the chat.

This kind of fulfillment that is individualized but doesn’t have to be tied to morality. People who take walks as their spiritual practice don’t necessarily tie that to spirituality or morality or ethics. But I would say that a practice like virginity can go both ways. Someone might choose to be chaste simply because they’re tired of having sex, they’re tired of being sexualized, and they think that it will for them as an individual, make their life better and increase their self-esteem, increase their mental health, increase their ability to sleep at night. But a Christian who is informed by evangelical Christian values and purity culture since the eighties and the nineties might say, well, virginity has to be my means of spiritual flourishing because my church leaders told me that it’s sinful if it’s not. Morality can come into the mix, but it doesn’t have to. But it seems to be coming into the mix in these texts, right?

Shirley Paulson

Can you talk about that, what you mean by the purity movement in the nineties?

Mallory Challis

Oh, yeah. The Evangelical purity movement kind of dates back to the late eighties and the early nineties. It had its inception earlier in the fifties, but nothing like this sort of popularized idea of the purity movement that happened in the nineties…

Shirley Paulson

1980s and 1990s

Mallory Challis:

I would say 1988 would be the latest, but perhaps earlier in certain evangelical circles. But certainly in the nineties, this was a popular sort of spiritual movement, and it was spearheaded very well in the Southern Baptist Convention with organizations like True Love Waits and Focus on the Family. And it was centered around these teachings that abstinence from sex was the way that you get close to God. You could be the best Christian ever. You could do all the things, but if you did not maintain abstinence from sex, you were failing as a Christian and you were not attaining this thing we’ve been calling spiritual flourishing. It was really this movement to promote abstinence from sex among young people, among Christians, among evangelicals everywhere, especially in the United States. And it was very based in shame and having this idea of feeling dirty after sex and having this idea that you can’t go back, you can’t undo it, you can’t unmake that decision after you’ve had sex once. That’s kind of a crash course of the nineties purity movement. I’m not sure how much more information you wanted.

Shirley Paulson

I want to ask if you could tell us a little bit more about how that compares to the early Christians. Was it there also? And, I mean, where did this come from? Did it come from anything related to early Christianity? Was it something just made up in the modern world?

Mallory Challis

Oh, yeah. I don’t think that it was made up in the modern world. I think we can see throughout all of Christian history conversations about sex and the morality of it. Certainly, the purity movement of the nineties claims certain scriptures are authoritative and very particular about sex and sexuality, but not all Christians agree. And we can see throughout Christian history that that disagreement has happened, and these conversations have been happening. I actually . . . part of the reason that I started this research was to sort of discover if there was an early Christian origin to the purity movement, and if this stuff was based in Christian history, if it was based in Christian scriptures, or where it came from. I do think that we can see in the timeline of these texts that conversations about sex and sexuality were happening throughout all of Christian history.

And because of Christian media in the nineties… Of course, that’s when the internet was happening and people were able to share things really quickly. That was really when it exploded. We couldn’t share the Acts of Peter and the Acts of John very quickly at all. They were sending letters on trade routes, but the purity movement of the nineties was super quick distribution of information. I mean, we can look at celebrities like the Jonas Brothers who had purity rings and were showing them off in promotion of these ideals. I think that media certainly has a big thing to do with it, but we’ve been having these conversations for all of Christian history.

Shirley Paulson

Interesting. Yvonne asks this on the chat, “Don’t people interpret their own spiritual flourishing? Perhaps whatever makes you feel closer to God or makes you feel like a blessing to others, whatever makes you feel more selfless, if that is your sense of spiritual flourishing.”

Mallory Challis

Yeah, I thank you, Yvonne, for posing that question. That’s kind of what we’re getting at here, isn’t it? This idea of, “Can spiritual flourishing be imposed on you, or does it have to be something that you practice yourself?” We can see it, certainly in the consequences of these narratives. These are scary narratives; these are not happy ones. We can see the kind of the consequences of trying to impose spiritual flourishing on a community because you have a specific standard that maybe your faith leaders want to meet, or maybe the one person who’s in charge just really is obsessed with, versus having more. I’m a Baptist, and I believe in not having any intermediaries between you and God. It’s more about, should we have this corporate spiritual flourishing, or should we focus more on, well, how do I feel God, how do I experience it? An experience of God that’s maybe different from my neighbor. And that’s okay.

Shirley Paulson

Very interesting. And so I almost skipped this, I’m sorry. Diana says this in the chat, “Perhaps these stories explain the Middle East culture insisting that women be covered up in public, males will be enticed by a woman’s presence and is up to her to maintain her chastity. Men are excused if the women don’t conform to these rules.” Do you have anything to say about that?

Mallory Challis

Yeah, I’ll admit that I don’t know a whole lot about Middle Eastern dress codes at this period of time, and so I don’t want to attempt to speak on that. I do think that this line of thinking though, speaks to this idea of modesty throughout Christian history. Those of us who remember the purity movement or experienced the purity movement, definitely remember being told “modest is hottest,” so you should cover up to prevent sexual temptation. And I’ve said a couple of times, Drusiana calls herself a source of temptation because her body was visible to this man who lusted after her. We can see some kind of motivation for hiding your body and covering up your body throughout these texts. I just don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know enough about Middle Eastern dress codes in the early Christian centuries to answer that question thoroughly. I’m sorry.

Shirley Paulson

That’s okay. Well, thank you for just bringing up the subject. So maybe one more thing to ask about is, I’m trying to understand Drusiana and Peter’s daughter a little bit themselves. Do you think of them as being typical of women who were just simply used, and they expected that because that’s the way it was? Or were they examples of women who were just trying to expose the problem? Is that why this was written? Which way did it go with them, do you think?

Mallory Challis

A really good question. I think for Peter’s daughter in this telling of the story, we don’t have really enough information about her as a person to know if she’s trying to fight against the patriarchy or if she’s just kind of there amidst all of these things that other people are doing to her and about her, she doesn’t even have any dialogue in this version of the narrative for Drusiana. I think we can definitely think of her as an elite woman who is leveraging her privilege as this wealthy woman to say, Hey, I’m going to go against the grain a little bit. I’m going to push because she could. And that was a privilege that not all women in early Christianity were afforded. Not all women could afford to hire a surrogate if they wanted to have a child, but wanted to remain chaste. Not all women had tons and tons of people begging for them to be resurrected after a crime happened to them. Not all women had that kind of notoriety that she seems to have. But I think these stories are told and retold because we are interested in what it means to survive things like this. We’re interested in what it means, as Drusiana kind of literally does, resurrect from the violence and subjugation of our fallen world. People are interested in what it means to say, no, I’m not going to let this stop me from being who I am and being who God created me to be or living out my purpose. Yeah.

Shirley Paulson

Gosh, that’s an awesome way to think about why we don’t have to be victims. And Toto, thank you for reminding us that Mallory brought some pictures to show us. Why don’t you go ahead and show us. I’m sorry, I almost forgot, but I appreciate that. Thank you.

Mallory Challis

Yeah, thank you. I actually have a few art pieces that I typically show, so I’ll move through a couple of them quickly. [Please watch video to see pieces.]

But I had one that I really wanted to show. This is an image from the fourth century. It’s from a catacomb, which is a kind of a place where the dead reside and it’s inscribed with Petron Mia. Martyr Petronella means little Peter.

There’s actually a later depiction of her narrative where the writers give her that name as sort of a, no, we don’t know her name, but she should have a name. We should have something to call her. And we can see this not very well preserved fresco and a catacomb. It’s sort of evidence that she was remembered and she was thought about.

This is another image of her from the 14th century.

She was actually revered for a time in the Catholic church as a saint. They believed that she, after this narrative, this is not in the narrative, but they believed that she potentially like Drusiana, gained mystical powers and was able to heal and offer salvation to believers. We can see her as this really beloved figure in Christian history. For centuries, people were telling her story for centuries, and it’s kind of being a forgotten one in modern times is a little bit of an anomaly.

This is an image of Drusiana and Callimachus, sort of an image of her resurrecting from her tomb. And this is another sort of medieval era image, the legacy of these women being remembered throughout Christian history for centuries. I love this piece just because it’s so well preserved and so well remembered. But yeah, this is her resurrecting from her tomb.

And the piece that I really wanted to show you is a piece that I had my friend made, actually her name is Nora. She’s another divinity student who does art. She does Christian art.

When I asked her to make this piece, I asked her to depict Petronella as a saint. And I asked her to see how she could imagine her in a peaceful scenario instead of sort of the craziness of what the narrative provides for her. She did a beautiful job. She’s laying in a field of flowers. She’s got flowers in her hair, she’s under a tree, she’s soaking up the sun. And I keep this image in my living room, and it kind of serves for me as a reminder that and resurrection of life is a real thing. We don’t have to succumb to the dark times. We do have the ability to come back and once again feel the light on our skin and have joy, and we can acknowledge the icky, messy violence that happens, but we can also imagine what it might mean to flourish after abuse.

Shirley Paulson

Wow, Mallory, I have to say this was a powerful conversation. I want to thank you so much for introducing these very surprising and difficult text, but also showing us how to read beyond what appears to be just a silly story into something very deep and meaningful. Gosh, I want to thank you so much, and I want to thank everybody for your participation.