Specters of Paul: Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought (review)

In his letter to the churches of Galatia, Paul wrote, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (NRSV Gal. 3:28). Elsewhere, Paul could write, “Women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church” (NRSV 1 Cor. 14:34–5). These words are probably an interpolation, but none doubt that the apostle authentically wrote, “Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife” (NRSV 1 Cor. 11:3). A generation ago, the famous tension between these passages might have been treated, prosaically, under the banner of “Paul’s attitudes towards women.”

In more recent years, these scriptural texts, and their reception, have been scrutinized as evidence for early Christian conceptions of gender. Benjamin Dunning’s Specters of Paul: Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought approaches this same problematic with the theoretical apparatus of continental philosophy (the book’s very title echoes Derrida’s Specters of Marx). But the principal innovation of Dunning’s study is to situate what he calls “the gender passages” more broadly in terms of Paul’s anthropology. In particular, Dunning analyzes the problem of sexual difference in light of the two essential passages where Paul treats Adam and Jesus respectively as figures of creation and resurrection (1 Cor. 15 and Rom. 5). How, his study asks, did early Christian authors, committed in various ways to Paul’s theological project, imagine the sexually differentiated body between the poles of creation and resurrection?

Dunning works within recent scholarship that has laid bare the “masculinist presuppositions of ancient androgyny”—a discovery which may seem to blunt the progressive moment of early Christian visions of salvation in which sexual difference would be dissolved. But Dunning will push this problem further. His most important contribution is to argue for two discursive strategies towards the problem of sexual difference. Some Christians, influenced by the Platonizing tradition, treat sexual difference “as a temporary problem to be resolved at the eschaton” (25). In this monist strand of thought, the sexually-differentiating characteristics of embodiment will be sublated in the finality of salvation. Other Christians, by contrast, could not envision the transcendence of the flesh in such a way that gender would cease to be a meaningful category of being; instead, sexual differentiation was an intentional part of the creation and would survive, in some form, the final resurrection.

The first chapter surveys the evidence for eschatological monism in the early Christian movement. As Dunning notes, Paul’s famous passage in Gal. 3:28 is quoting a dominical saying which enjoyed broader diffusion. Though the apostle’s formulation was destined to become the canonical form, it was not his creation. Dunning rapidly surveys the parallel evidence—2 Clement, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Gospel of Thomas—before turning more explicitly to monist texts like the Valentinian Tripartite Tractate. Dunning refers repeatedly to “the Platonic woman,” and he might have offered some discussion of Plato’s own views of gender and sexual difference, but it does appear that Plato’s metaphysics, rather than the Athenian’s cultural presuppositions about gender, are what mattered most for the early Christian tradition.

Chapter 2 treats Clement of Alexandria, for whom “the difference between male and female is a temporary element of human existence to be shed at the eschaton” (51). In Clement’s thought the soul is the ground of being, and it is distinct from the sexually differentiated body. Dunning wants to call particular attention to Clement’s retelling of the Fall in Protrepticus 11, in which Eve is missing; he argues that she...