Date: Sun, 05 Apr 1998 13:23:04 -0400
From: Michael Grondin <mgrondin@tir.com>
To: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com
Subject: Re: Original GThomas: Male-Female

Bill Arnal writes:
> ... #114 is also NOT anti-woman, but IS anti-sexual
> or some such thing, and may be anti-reproduction. The
> problem is, the saying doesn't specify what "becoming male" 
> actually means. Sure, it COULD means shaving your head and
> wearing boy's clothes; but it COULD also mean simply
> practicing asceticism, not reproducing, etc. 
  (more good stuff left out here)

Gentlemen (Steve & Bill):
Allow me to introduce another level of meaning into this discussion of
"making the female male" (and also "making the two one", n.b.): the
syntactic level. Not the major level of meaning, of course, but one
which, I think, should not be ignored.

As you know, Coptic differentiates between masculine and feminine nouns.
It is possible to conjoin masculine and feminine elements into a single
Coptic "word", such as is done twice in the following key passage from
the Apocryphon of John:

> The glory of Barbelo ... This is the first thought, his image; she
> became the womb of everything (the All), for she is prior to all of
> them, the Mother-Father, the first man, holy spirit, the thrice-male,
> the three powers, the three names androgynous, and the eternal aeon
> among the invisible ones, and the first to come forth.

Here we have two androgynous Coptic "words": 'the-Mother-Father' and the
word 'androgynous' itself, which is literally (in Coptic) 'male-female'.
Now I know that once one has zeroed-in on the GTh, it's easy to overlook
the other works which surround it in Codex II, but we ought to keep in
mind that the same folks who brought us the Coptic GTh also brought us
the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of Philip. Even if they did
nothing at all with the GTh as they received it (which, as you know, I
regard as highly implausible), they have at least tacitly approved its
contents by including it in a very prominent place in the collection
(second only to the AOJ in the entire "library"). Is it likely, then,
that this talk of "making the female male" in GTh should mean something
quite alien to the thinking expressed in AOJ, appearances to the
contrary notwithstanding?

But let me return to the syntactical point: it's inconceivable to me
that Coptic writers would even translate this stuff about "making the
female male" without reflecting on the gender distinction in the syntax
of their own language. If they believed that Jesus had in fact ordained
that the female become male, what would this entail that one ought to do
about the syntactical distinction? Perhaps do some symbolic attaching of
feminine nouns to masculine ones? (Wherein the masculine element would
"lead", i.e., precede, the feminine)?

Mike ('Marcion') Grondin