There Is No Male and Female

Years ago in the Harvard Divinity School library, I read a thesis called, There Is No Male and Female by Dennis R. MacDonald. Professor MacDonald revised and published it, and just recently, I read it again.

The book is excruciatingly erudite, but its conclusion is fascinating. Professor MacDonald painstakingly demonstrates that by the time St. Paul wrote Galatians (54-55 C.E.) there was already circulating a widespread oral tradition to the effect that Jesus had taught a mystery about the union of the sexes. In fact, MacDonald shows that in Galatians Paul was rebutting the authenticity of the tradition by recasting it in terms he was comfortable with.

So what do these ancient sources say Jesus is supposed to have taught? That you enter the Kingdom when you tread upon the garment of shame, and when the two become one and the male with the female neither male nor female.

Fragments of this pre-Paul tradition turned up by way of Syria (the Gospel of Thomas), Greece (2 Clement) and Egypt (the Gospel of the Egyptians). They are strikingly similar, yet not so similar as to be derived from one another - hence MacDonald's conclusion that they all stem from an oral tradition.

Until recently we had few clues about the substance behind this "two become one, neither male nor female" language. A few decades back, however, some ancient Christian texts turned up in a cave in Upper Egypt (the Nag Hammadi Codices). Those not used in cooking fires by the discoverer's mother were eventually translated. Scholars lump them together with the few similar fragments already known, and refer to them as the Gnostic Gospels. They portray a cosmology far different from our more familiar gospels - yet distinctly Christian.

Here are some concepts from the Gnostic Gospels that will intrigue anyone interested in the hidden potential of sacred sexuality. They say man was created in God's image, that is, immortal, androgynous (whole), and not in a physical body (which they call, "the garment of shame"). They say that Adam and Eve gave in to temptation and engaged in physical reproduction. That led to a "separation" between them that was the start of our collective tumble into mortality. (How interesting that conventional sex does indeed lead to separation between the sexes because of the temptation, or reward, mechanism deep in the primitive part of the brain.)...