What would Jesus advise if call-in Christian talk shows were around in his day? Say a viewer wrote in, distraught that his wife did not respect him as the head of household, hurled insults at him and even raised her hand as if to threaten violence.
Should he beat his wife? Stand up to her? Show her what it means to obey? Those were among televangelist Pat Robertson’s implications last week on his show, “The 700 Club,” which drew angry protests and renewed debate over what it means to be a Christian husband ”” or wife.
Some 2,000 years after the Resurrection, the outcry highlights how intensely society still grapples with these roles.
But those who use Scripture to argue that wives are somehow lesser than husbands are missing Christ’s larger message, according to an array of local ministers, from traditional to progressive.
Read it all from the local paper Faith and Values section.
There’s much I agree with on this article but I think the point I quote above, begins rightly but goes off the rails in the implicit stereotype it draws of first century Judaism. Theologically, the danger is a kind of unreflective Marcionism (or worse). As the Jewish scholar Amy Jill Levine has written, the Jesus that emerges from this stereotyped contrast is a member of the ALCU, Greenpeace, the National Organization of Women and the United Nations (on a good day).