Here’s a part of my final exam for Early Christian Bodies.
Part two: One text (25%) Imagine you are explaining this course to someone who has no background in early Christian bodies. They ask you to share one primary source text that will give them a snapshot of this class. In around 750 words, explain what text you would choose, what you think it would convey to your friend, and what it would not capture in terms of this course’s ideas, themes, or questions.
An Email from Jess to her best friend and teaching partner, Adam
Hey Adam,
There is So. Much. To say about this place. It feels like Oz: lots of glitz and spectacle, but also you suspect that most everyone is under a kind of spell… More soon, I promise. BUT. I am loving Early Christian Bodies.
If you read one text to help you get what this class is doing, I’d suggest 1 Corinthians. It blew me away. I’d just thought that Paul was a misogynist bossing people around (another religious hand-me-down from my mother: SO many of those coming up!). But I was wrong: he’s trying to help folks figure out how they live—as individuals and in community—now that they’ve decided to change their lives by becoming Christians.
Remember that point when you got really into yoga, and started reading the Yoga Sutras[1], and were ready to turn your life inside out practicing the yamas and niyamas[2]? And you were trying to figure out how to eat so you would be observing ahimsa[3]—did you really have to become a vegetarian?—and also what did it really mean to practice brahmacarya[4], was it abstinence or just moderation: remember all that? This text is like sitting down with a good—not perfect, but good—teacher who meets you in that headspace and gives you the straight talk about what practice is. “Okay, so being a yogi is and isn’t like before. Is smoking weed and eating cheeseburgers everyday really going to move you toward samadhi[5]? Would you instruct your students in this life?” It’s a book on how you treat your body as a Christian. Really compelling. Paul admonishes them for being too attached to who baptized who, which sounds like that bitchy lineage talk you hear from some yogis; there’s language about food, and sexual immorality. But it’s not rigid, it’s not dos-and-don’ts. Yes, there’s the chapter that EVERYONE reads at their Christian wedding, but in context, it’s saying that it doesn’t matter how many spiritual gifts you have, if you can’t love one another, you might as well be pissing in the wind. We’ve seen this, right? Siddhis[6] are all well and good for parlor tricks, but if you’re abusing your students who cares that you can astral project?
There’s a lot the letter leaves out: the way ancient bodies are gendered, or misgendered, and it’s pretty wishy-washy on freedom and slavery and equal rights. Hence fundamentalists using it as an excuse for abuse. But when you look closely, it’s… powerful: all of this as a response to Jesus. It’s amazing that one man had so much sway over so many hearts and minds, and at the same time, the early Christian experience just sounds so tortured. I feel for these early Christians. This miraculous man came and showed people how to love and forgive, and all any of his early followers can think about is if they’re suffering enough to be like them, whether they should stay virgins their whole lives. Can they have sex like the pagans or wear what pagans wear or eat what they eat. It’s like embodiment (and in this way it’s a bit Tantric) is this great veil of distraction that they can’t see past, that has them all tied up. It’s the worst and they’re just all so hungry and desperate for Christ to return and free them all form the hell of having to exist in a body.
I don’t know how much the world has changed in two thousand years. Sure, we have computers in our pockets, we’ve seen the edges of space, we can smash molecules into each other. But we’re still flummoxed by sex and power and how not to treat each other like crap. Thinking about how these things functioned in ancient (western) societies changes how you see them when you look at contemporary society.
It’s certainly lit a fire of compassion inside me. As frustrated and short-tempered as I get with Christianity, it’s as confused and frustrated—and immature—as it was in the early common era. But it also makes me want to write, to help and teach and say, y’all need to get better at this. This is not what it means to walk with Christ. We can do better.
It’s nice to read text that lights a fire under your ass like that. And that was just from the New Testament.
I miss you. More soon,
Jess
[1] A seminal yoga philosophy text attributed to Patanjali written and compiled around 5th Century CE.
[2] The first two “limbs” or paths of yoga, that correspond to observances of behavior.
[3] The first yama, meaning nonviolence or non-harm.
[4] The fourth yama, meaning abstinence, or literally to walk with God.
[5] The final limb of yoga, complete absorption with Divine.
[6] A siddhi is a kind of spiritual gift or ability that is cultivated through extensive, deep practice, enumerated in the Yoga Sutras.