WAS JESUS A SEXIST BY CONFORMITY?

Was Jesus a sexist by conformity, or did he have deep-rooted hidden issues with women? I personally have problems with his silence on and total disregard of women’s rights.

It is no secret that the role of women in his society was very limited to domestic obligations/duties and submission to a very patriarchal society. Women were treated as second class citizens, and they were subject to all kinds of physical and psychological abuses from their male counterparts. Yet, nowhere in his ministry has it been reported of his advocacy specifically for women’s rights. He addressed every single issue -taxation, law and order, governance, etc… -affecting his society, except that human relations glitch.

Also, how come his disciples, his pals or members of his immediate entourage were all men? That could not be a random misstep or a rare, simple and exceptional coincidence. What could it be exactly? Were the women not good enough to be in his close circle? What key role if any did women play in his ministry anyway?

I think the selection-elimination process by which he proceeded to select his disciples has got to be discriminatory or prejudicial. That was a well-thought-out decision to conform to the norms of his time. In other words, the decision to ostracize the women was not a simple and isolated coincidence.

I know some of you are going to use the storyline of the woman prostitute whose life he had spared from the people who wanted to stone her to death for violating an established societal law against overt and covert prostitution to rebut. Well, let me say to you that he did not defend her rights, which had never existed in and been recognized by her society to begin with. Rather, he wanted to pinpoint the hypocrisy that existed in the people of his time.

Maybe he was not an overt sexist, but he was a conformist who went silent on the ways women were being treated. The problems women were facing then are basically the same as the ones they are facing in today’s society. If he was alive today, how would he address unfair treatments of women in our society?

2 comments on “WAS JESUS A SEXIST BY CONFORMITY?

  1. I believe you are right when you say that the elimination of women from his selections of disciples was deliberate but I think that there’s a logical explanation for this. As you rightly pointed out, the role of women at the time was one of servitude and domesticity. They absolutely were less than second class citizens, they were properties of either their husbands or fathers. As chattels, women were quite insignificant. If Jesus wanted to spread his message it would not have been prudent to pick women disciples to help him do so. No one would listen to them. It was hard enough for people to listen to the men he chose to be his disciples to get his message across to the masses. Had he chosen women for that job, it would have been futile to his cause because women were to be seen and not heard. No one would have given Christianity any importance and his message would have been lost. So, as a matter of necessity, Christ had to chose men to be his messengers. It had nothing to do with how he himself felt about women (btw Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute as represented by the bible, she is represented that way by the powers that be when they made changes to the original text in order to lessen the importance of the role she and women really played in establishing Christianity…I believe she was a disciple herself based on intensive research ).

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