Wives, submit...

I originally shared this in a private Facebook group for the podcast Walk Softly Children, about a missing girl and one messed up, abusive, fundamentalist “Christian” dad. I figured it would be decent content for the blog, though, too, because I keep having to have this conversation over-and-over with religious men in my life. Men my age. All of whom listen to Jordan Peterson, coincidentally, and let themselves be consumed with thoughts of ‘hierarchies.’

Hello everyone,

I have been devouring this podcast over the last few days and find it all at once heartbreaking and riveting. I’m in season 2, but I’m going so fast that, I imagine by the time you read this I will have caught up with the gang. 

I wanted to chime in and offer a formerly fundamentalist, formerly evangelical Christian perspective on Mark’s beliefs and actions. I have some experience in this area. I’ve found that men who seek to use the bible as a means of subjugating and abusing their own wives and families use one and only one bible verse as license to do so.

The verse is in Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus, we call it Ephesians, chapter five. It says, “Wives, submit to your husbands.” At just a casual reading, in the English language, this is an appalling and wholly disagreeable command which establishes a hierarchy in the home and puts the male over the female in the relationship.

This is where the idea of ‘male headship’ comes from. As I said, this is the one and only verse which can be used to justify abuse, but it has to be done so at the exclusion of other, very clear verses which say things like, wife-batterers’ prayers won’t be heard (written in a letter by Peter), and, we shouldn’t allow a wife-batterer to be an elder in our church (written in a letter to Timothy).

At just a casual reading, in English, “Wives, submit...” sounds like biblical grounds to dominate and control your own wife. But the bible wasn’t written in English. This letter, in particular, was written in Greek, which was the language of the people of first and second century Asia Minor. When claiming this passage of the bible or seeking to establish it as authoritative on some issue like this, we have to be good students of the bible and go back to its original language. We have to try to make sure that we’ve got it right. Of course, Mark and his own pastor have not done this, because learning biblical greek is just too hard. Hell, for the fundamentalists that I have encountered, reading it in English once was hard enough.

I continually find myself surprised they even made it to chapter five of Ephesians.

In the Greek, that little word ‘submit’ is a sticky one. It’s pronounced hupotasso. We don’t have a great analog for it in the English language at all, so we have to study other places in antiquity, in ancient writings, where the word was used. When we do so, we find that it is always used in military contexts.

The word denotes ‘keeping in step with’ or ‘marching along with’ or ‘falling in line with’ or ‘being associated with,’ as in one garrison or detachment. We have textual evidence of this in first century Roman writings. If I were giving an order, for a detachment of troops to go off and together flank the enemy, I might say to one soldier or another, “Soldier, you must hupotasso with your men. Together, as one unit, flank the enemy.” In other words, don’t go off half-cocked and try to cowboy your way through this battle. You’ve got to stick together!

The best translation that I can come up with is, “Wives, keep in lock-step with your husbands.” In other words, don’t march too far ahead of him, and don’t let yourself fall behind. There’s no hierarchy being established; a soldier has his or her marching orders, and now, he or she must keep in-step with the rest of the platoon. This is borne out in contextual evidence, right there in the same passage, where Paul uses even more military imagery, saying things like, “Put on the full armor of God,” with the weapons of truth and the shields or helmets of righteousness, that is, being a decent person. If you speak the truth and you treat others with compassion, you’re going to be fine, is Paul’s conclusion to the whole thing.

Reading it in its original language changes the passage entirely, doesn’t it? And regardless of your beliefs about the bible, you and I would agree that the best marriages are ones in which husbands and wives work together, march together, toward a common goal.

The passage doesn’t start with a command for wives, however. It starts with a command for all believers, in the church at Ephesus: “Be subject to one another,” be at peace, as an act of reverence toward the Christ. And the passage ends with another clear command, this time only for husbands: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved his church.” The assertion is that Christ loved his church by dying for her. Likewise, Paul says, husbands ought to be ready to die for their wives. Now that is biblical ‘submission!’

I’d be remiss if I failed to mention, too, that there simply is no verb in the Greek of the sentence, “Wives, submit...” that verb, hupotasso, “to submit,” is carried over from the first verse--the verse where all of the church folks in Ephesus are told to submit themselves to one another. The writer tells all of them, men and women, to keep in-step with one another, maintaining peace in their congregation, and then he says, yes, even wives are to do this. I’ll get into his reasoning for that in a moment. Put short: He said, “even you wives” because, in the first and second century ephesian economy, the women pretty much ran things.

Listening to the podcast, Jessica has hinted at her own relationship with her husband Joe, and it sounds like Joe has stepped into some of the riskier situations as they investigate. I think at one point, the podcast said that Joe spoke to Mark. That’s the kind of self-sacrifice that the bible is all about!--putting your life on the line for the sake of another. But there would be no investigation, if it were left to the men in this story. You can hear how Jessica is moving the investigation along, maybe getting ahead of herself at times, if you will. So, the way I see it, Jessica and Joe are beautifully modeling the type of marriage that Ephesians is actually about.

Two final thoughts, and I promise I’ll try to be brief. I hinted at this above: The letter to the church at Ephesus wasn’t written for us, it’s not to us, and it should not be treated as prescriptive for any of our own marriages. It is a letter, written nearly 2,000 years ago, to people in one church, a whole world away from us. It’s not about us.

In the church at Ephesus, there was a problem that churches of our day simply don’t have. Ephesus was a city dedicated and devoted to the goddess Artemis, representing fertility. Worship of Artemis was quite erotic, quite sexually liberated. The temple was run by prostitutes rather than priests. And sex work was a readily accepted option for all women in the ephesian economy, not just within the temple. It was a perfectly socially acceptable way of making money. Men and women alike would come to the temple, eat raw meat until they vomited, drink these psychedelic, ergot-infused wines and huff gas, and have free sex with many, many men and women alike. Then they would bring S.T.D.s home to their wives or husbands. This was all perfectly socially acceptable; it simply was polite society. And members of the ephesian community had started to bring all of those same behaviors into the church, simply trading Artemis for Jesus Christ. It would be like me walking into a Baptist church today, butt-naked, and asking, “Where’s the beef?” The raw beef. And, “Say, where are all the sex workers?” The priestesses.

And women had power over men--politically and otherwise--because the goddess of fertility was with the woman, who bore the child. The city was not a patriarchy, it was very much a matriarchy, as evidenced by archaeological findings; we’ve found hundreds of thousands of tributes to Artemis, big and small, all over the city. We also know from ancient writings that the High Priests of the temple of Artemis, and the city’s highest-ranking local politicians (because there was no separation of church and state) were fifteen women. It was a matriarchal culture, within the city walls.

If anything, husbands had been made to submit to their wives in Ephesus. Paul wasn’t writing to put women in their place, he was writing to say, “Hey, don’t get too far ahead of your husband. Let him keep up with you.” In your leadership of the temple and of the city, and in your representation of Artemis as women, Paul is saying, don’t leave your husband behind.

Nowadays, I don’t know how much of the bible I actually believe. I certainly don’t believe that it is all relevant to my own life. Such belief is naive at best, arrogant at worst. But I do want to set the record straight on this one, as often as I have the ability, because I recognize that that this one little verse, these two words, “Wives, submit...” has caused irreparable harm in our day. It has empowered wicked men like Mark to do all manner of awful things. And in our patriarchal society, it has held us all back, because it has been used to diminish the wonderful work of women among us.

I also just like to point out that the bible is not this colossal thing we’ve made it. It’s a collection of poems, letters, and stories, written in antiquity. It’s important to note that it was written about real places, like Ephesus, with real cultural issues that are completely different from the issues that we face in modern-day America. It’s not for us. It’s not about us. If anything, it has been preserved for our benefit. Nothing else.

All my life, I’ve been a person of the book. I’ve been a student of it. My life has revolved around it. And now, in my young adulthood, I’m finding myself asking, Was it worth it? When you separate yourself from the book and say, “This is not about me,” it allows you to read it for what it is. There are a lot of wonderful things in the book. A lot of scary and sad things in it, too. And a lot of things to think about.

But abusive men like Mark don’t think. And they sure as hell don’t read. I’ve yet to meet a fundamentalist Christian who actually knows their bible.

For reference, there’s a wonderful book about all of this called Violence Against Women and Children: A Theological Sourcebook. It contains essays on things like the word Greek word hupotasso.

Looking forward to catching this guy, and I really hope the podcast is able to do what the police have failed to since 1981.

With justice for Doree,

J.T.