The story is told in countless versions. Somebody—a saintly rabbi, a mystic caught up in holy ecstasy, even in one version a lost astronaut—chances to see God face to face and lives to tell about it. "What is God really like?" asks an anxious crowd back home. The narrator hesitates. "You'll be shocked," he warns. He is pressed further. "Well," he finally says, "to begin with, she's black."
The message of the joke would be lost in some cultures; in India, for instance, Kali—an incarnation of the Hindu mother goddess—is both female and black. But it bites enough in Western civilization, where Judaeo-Christian theology has intermittently taught white superiority over black and consistently taught male superiority over female. Color prejudice in theology has been largely expunged. Gender prejudice remains. God is the Father. Jesus Christ is the Son. Even the Holy Spirit, in the New Testament, is "he." And women? Women are the daughters of Eve, the original temptress.
Easy Divorce. Such simple categories are being questioned today, but the questioners are working against some 3,000 years of Judaeo-Christian thought. The trouble began, appropriately, with the creation narrative in Genesis, particularly when the first woman was molded from Adam's rib. Eve succumbed to the temptation of the serpent, and Adam in turn capitulated to her. "The woman you gave me," he was soon grousing to God. "She gave me the fruit." Ever after, Scripture notes with a certain masculine piety, women would bear children in sorrow and pain, and their husbands would be their masters.
Biblical laws reflected the discrimination. Wives were guilty of adultery if they had had sexual relations with any other man; husbands only if they had had relations with another married woman. Divorce was easy for a man. Later, in rabbinical law, women were classed with slaves and minors in being exempted from certain required prayers.
In the New Testament, Jesus set aside the male's privilege of easy divorce. He hobnobbed openly with women, talked about God with them, pointedly saved a condemned adulteress. The rabbis had taught that women could not be witnesses because, like Eve, they were easily deceived. By contrast, the first witnesses to Jesus' Resurrection were three women. For all this, the fact remains that the Redeemer was a man—the son, not the daughter, of God. And his twelve Apostles were all men.
Ill Wind. St. Paul, Jesus' prime interpreter to the world, hardly resolved the ambiguity. On the one hand, Paul encouraged women to prophesy, as they had in Jewish tradition; and at least one of his close colleagues was a woman prophet: Priscilla. He also observed that there was "neither male nor female in Christ." But in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul admonished women to wear veils and be silent at services. Christian theologians came to view this text as proof that women should be excluded from the ministry and priesthood.
The Christian centuries that followed were more plainspoken. Tertullian reflected the mind of many early church fathers when he pronounced, in the 3rd century, that women were "the devil's gateway."