Beeson podcast, Episode 399
Dr. Lynn Cohick
July 3, 2018

Announcer:	Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.
Timothy George:	Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. Well today I have the privilege of talking with a distinguished scholar, New Testament scholar, Lynn Cohick. She has served as professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and she is the incoming provost and dean of Denver Seminary, a wonderful teacher of Scripture and of God's people. Dr. Cohick, it's an honor to talk with you today on the Beeson Podcast.
Lynn Cohick:	Oh well thank you so much Timothy for inviting me to talk about something I love which is the Early Church.
Timothy George:	Yeah. We actually want to focus on a book that you have written with Dr. Amy Brown Hughes. Dr. Hughes teaches at Gordon College. You all have collaborated on what is a fantastic book, "Christian Women in the Patristic World: Their influence, authority and legacy in the second through fifth centuries." Let me just start by asking you how you got interested in this topic, what led you to develop this theme for the book.
Lynn Cohick:	Yes. Well, I've been interested in women's Christian experience both ancient and modern really, since I was in college. I began my, as I began my studies in graduate school, that was the time when feminist studies came into the academy, the early '80s, and second wave of feminism, equal pay for equal work, and all of that. 
	There was a real interest in looking at how women in the Greco-Roman world, the Jewish world, the Christian world, how they lived their lives generally speaking and then specifically in their religion. When I was in graduate school, I did an independent study on a medieval figure, Julian of Norwich. She had, yeah, it's a very compelling ... She has a vision which she then meditated on for years afterwards, and she wrote what's called "The Showings."
	It really explores in a deep way the nature of sin and forgiveness, but also in this, she thinks about the qualities of Jesus, the maternal qualities of Jesus, Jesus as mother, not in a literal sense, but in this metaphorical sense. I was captivated by how she was understanding theology through this vision.
	At the same time, I also ran across Tertullian, who is an Early Church father, and his line, that women are the devil's gateway. They're very different approaches to thinking about women, women and Christianity. I have to say that as I learn more about Tertullian, he actually would have approved of Julian's desire to know God deeply. He would have accepted in principle that God gives visions to men and women alike. As I started to dig deeper, I realized these surface contrasts really are not the end answer. There's more to it.
	I think that's why both Amy and I decided to look more deeply at this because some people are completely turned off by the church when they read out of context a statement like Tertullian's, or other people just accept the church fathers without any kind of careful interpretation. We just kind of wanted to dig deeper.
Timothy George:	I'm so glad you did. You just used the phrase ‘church fathers’, which is of course where we get patristics as a discipline of early church study, but you're focusing the light on, can we call them church mothers as well? Often somewhat obscured in the historiography. Maybe we don't know as much or don't have as much from their own pens, but there were these very important characters that had a forming role in the life of the church and its spirituality and devotion and you've put the spotlight on them. Why is it important to do that?
Lynn Cohick:	I think for a couple of reasons it's important. I think we, to be historically accurate, we need to do that, to be just kind of fair for how the church developed. I think secondly, if we only imagine that the real Christians of that time were men who just thought like really deep sort of theological thoughts and then wrote them down in very difficult-to-understand treatises, we really have a skewed understanding of what the church is all about. These same men, like a Jerome or an Augustine or a Chrysostom or a Gregory of Nyssa, they're also going to church a lot, and they're fellowshipping with men and women of all sorts, and they're taking the Eucharist and they're participating in baptism.
	They're doing all kinds of things as a way to become stronger in their faith and to be transformed into the image of Christ the Son. What focusing on women at this time does, is it reminds us of how important liturgy was at this time. We kind of, I think some, imagine that well the church fathers decided something and liturgy implemented it, but it was a much more dynamic and circular process. Women were very involved in that. 
	I think of Helena, who is Constantine's mother, who you could say really developed the religious architecture of the city of Jerusalem. We enjoy that to this day with the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Women played such a role in how we think about our devotional life, and how we live out the liturgical calendar, and then they were conversation partners with the church fathers. 
	Jerome had a very close and intellectually vigorous relationship with a woman, Paula, who was a wealthy woman and sponsored him so that he could sit for long periods of time and write. I think they had a very intellectually stimulating relationship. How much of what Jerome wrote was because of his conversations with Paula? We'll probably never know because we have no direct letters from her, but he gives her a lot of credit and so this book is trying to help us see those women who actually were very influential, even if we don't have something directly from their pen.
Timothy George:	You mentioned Helena. I've often thought of her as kind of the pioneer of Christian trips to the Holy Land. In a way she started that pilgrimage motif at a time when to recover the places associated with Jesus' life and death and so forth. That really began and continues to this day as a major Christian motif of spiritual longing and travel.
Lynn Cohick:	Absolutely. She also did that as a representative of the imperial family, and that's another component of all of this, that I think as ... Sometimes if we just look at theology we forget that the political dynamics of this, to have the sponsorship of a member of the imperial family was very, very important and the imperial coffers that were opened to be able to give back to the church, spaces of grandeur and also sponsoring the monasteries and all of that, helping with the councils, all of that, there were women who were leaders like we might think of Elizabeth I, Queen of England much later, who were very, very important at the upper echelons of leadership within the church, even though they wouldn't have held a position like priest or bishop.
Timothy George:	Yeah. One of the earliest women you discuss is Thecla. Who is Thecla and what should we know about her? Why are you interested in her?
Lynn Cohick:	Yes, well she's one of the earliest, in fact probably the first martyr, the first female martyr that we know about. Her story is found in a work called "The Acts of Paul and Thecla." If you just type that into Google, you'll be able to find it online. It's a very influential story, through the whole period of our book, the second through the fifth century. It has miracles in it that when we read it today, we kind of wonder, really? Is that kind of possible?
	There are, it's difficult to know just how historical she really is as a figure, but my sense is that there is, there really was a woman who was dedicated to promoting and preaching the gospel, and that there grew a legend around her and Paul. The Acts of Paul and Thecla is not part of Scripture. We don't want to read it to understand who Paul is. It's not authoritative in that way, but it is very useful and helpful for those who want to see how the church was thinking about their expressions of the gospel in those first decades of the second century.
	At the end of the book, she is kind of taken up. She's in a cave and she's going to be abused by these male ruffians that want to do her some harm, and the side of the cave opens up, and she walks in and the wall gets put back, and she's saved. That's her martyrdom. Her story, though, is about faithfully following after God based on Paul's gospel message. 
	What's so powerful, what I think people in those centuries, both men and women, when they looked at Thecla and they used her as a model, they saw someone who was willing to give up social honor. She was a wealthy woman. Give up family, she was engaged to be married and she broke that off. She would have been engaged to a pagan man, and instead she chose Christianity. She defied her family in the sense that they wanted her to marry and to stay a pagan, but she tried to reconcile with her mom. 
	That unfortunately didn't happen in the story, but she didn't want to be alienated from the family, but she just realized that the Roman values that she grew up in, focusing on wealth, focusing on handing that wealth on to your children, did not match with the gospel call to give your life for Jesus. That's what she does, is give her life for Jesus and she ends up being an itinerant preacher, very similar to Paul, just sharing the gospel message. I think that's what people just were, they were taken by her just utter devotion, come what may, to the call of God on her life.
Timothy George:	I sometimes think of this kind of literature, the Acts of Thecla and Paul, and some of the other writings we may want to talk about, as kind of devotional reading in the early church.
Lynn Cohick:	Yes.
Timothy George:	It's not the Bible. It's not Holy Scripture. It's not divinely inspired in the way the Scripture is, but it's consonant with Scripture and it in some ways extends the story of the church into the early period that Christians were living in, being persecuted very often.
Lynn Cohick:	Yes. These devotional, I really think that's right, yes. To see it as devotional. When we pick it up today, we're going to have a window open to us on how Christians in the early centuries thought about their body for example. Thecla is an ascetic. That means she restricts her diet. She wears very simple clothing. What people don't often realize today is that back in her time, you were able to show your wealth by your clothing and by being able to have fancy food and so Thecla's testimony was very much about pushing against that value, the wealth and success and all of that business.
	I think of actually Paul when he says in 1 Timothy that women shouldn't wear pearls or fancy hairdos. Part of that is he is also saying because to have pearls or to have a fancy hairdo meant you were wealthy, and he didn't want certain Christians showing off in front of other Christians. What do they say? The ground at the foot of the cross is level, right? We're all the same at the foot of the cross. Thecla really demonstrated that.
	The other thing she did was she really demonstrated the conviction of the resurrection of the body. At different times, she was put in the arena. She was going to be drawn and quartered. She was going to be burned. She was going to have a lion eat her. All these things, and her testimony to the governor is that she'll be raised. Pagans who listen to that, many pagans who listened to that, were captivated by that conviction of the resurrection of the body. Those are a couple of things that I think Thecla can even help us understand today. 
Timothy George:	These themes we're talking about, particularly virginity and asceticism, I think are especially problematic to those of us in the more Protestant Evangelical tradition. We associate them often with kind of Catholic works righteousness, something the Reformation did away with, and yet they are ideals of the Christian life, from which we can learn something. Of course, virgins, and in the early church, an order of women, of godly women who served Christ and served the church. Asceticism, it wasn't only limited to women. We have to say that. Asceticism also is something that was known to the monks, to those who fled into the desert like St. Anthony. These are maybe, could you call them virtues of Christian living that we need to rediscover in a way in our own time? What would you think about that?
Lynn Cohick:	Yes, I think so. I think that you're absolutely right. Celibacy which we might call that for men, that a man is celibate and a woman is a virgin, although men can be virgins and there are church fathers who were virginal, but the idea that was so pronounced at this time was the sense that, where I'm going, in the new heavens and the new earth, I'm going to have a raised, glorified body. It's going to be physical in some way, but the material is going to be different like Jesus' raised body was different. He could eat but he could walk through walls. There's a different corporality to it.
Timothy George:	We could do one but not the other.
Lynn Cohick:	Exactly. We'll break our nose. I think what the Early Church saw was this idea that okay, if that's how I'm going to be, how can I start living like that now? How can I testify to the fact that my body, as a man or as a woman, is going to be raised immortal and imperishable and live with Jesus for all time? When I do that, there will be a perfection in my male or female body, will be perfected such that I won't have romantic love like I have now or I won't have children like I have now. It will be a different sort of body but nevertheless male and female.
	Okay. One of the ways we can live out that experience now in some small way is to be celibate and to be ascetic, where we're thinking not to harm our bodies. Quite the opposite. The ascetics loved their bodies or at least that was the goal. They loved them because they knew they were eternal and they wanted to use them rightly. That's I think what the ascetic, the celibate, the virgin, what they are teaching us, is to love our bodies properly. That's what they're, they can help us see.
Timothy George:	That word asceticism I think comes from the Greek askesis which really means exercise, doesn't it?
Lynn Cohick:	Exactly.
Timothy George:	Exertion in a good way, like we want to get in shape. We have to exercise. We have to walk or run or something. Asceticism in a way, I think is a discipline of the body in order to get body and soul both in shape for living the life of God.
Lynn Cohick:	Exactly right. I think the ascetics and especially the women, they recognized how important their bodies were for their whole spiritual life. They wanted to integrate body and soul because it would be fully and perfectly integrated in the resurrection body.
Timothy George:	Some of these themes we're talking about come together in I think a powerful way in one of the most popular stories of the early church. Perpetua and Felicitas. They were both martyrs. Tell us about them and their story and their martyrdom and how that affects the way we think about the Christian life today.
Lynn Cohick:	Yes. Yes. In 203 AD, in a town in North Africa, two women, Felicitas and Perpetua along with a couple of others were arrested for being Christians. The context is that they were not going to offer a sacrifice in honor of the emperor, maybe give a libation, a bit of wine, say a few words, toss a bit of incense on sacred fire. They refused to do that, and so they were thrown in prison.
	Perpetua keeps a diary. This may ... There's discussion about is this really written by Perpetua, but there's enough, I think there's enough evidence to suggest that she's behind it at least, even if the final version of it isn't directly from her pen. It's definitely her thoughts. So that's kind of amazing that we have a document from a woman in this time.
	What she does is she tells us about her life in prison and four visions that she has. Her life in prison is awful as you can imagine. She also wrestles with her father who's pagan and doesn't want her to follow through with her faith. There's this famous line she says. It's very simple, "I am a Christian." That reverberates actually throughout the martyr testimonies. You have other female martyrs. They just have this statement, I am a Christian.
	Perpetua's also a mother. She has a young son who's still nursing. It unfolds that she's very much part of a family. She's a mother. She's a daughter. She processes through what that means in light of the calling of God for her to be a martyr. The visions that she has are, in part, related to helping her understand and be assured that should she die a martyr's death, she will gain a martyr's crown. The others who are with her, they see these visions as authoritative. They trust her as a leader, so that when they go into the arena, she leads them in. 
	The other character in the title is Felicitas, and she is a slave woman who gives birth very shortly, a day or two before she enters the arena. What's fascinating. So here we have another mother. We have two mothers who are martyred. She hands off her daughter to another sister in the church who's not arrested and will be able to raise the daughter, but Felicitas talks about how the labor that she is going through is just her own labor right then, but when she goes into the arena, there is someone who is inside her, that is Christ, who will labor on her behalf. It's just a beautiful way of thinking about the sacrifice of Christ. The narrator talks about how she went from blood to blood. From the blood of delivering a baby to the blood of being a martyr.
	The other thing is they used to talk about martyrs having their birthday as the day that they were martyred and gone. Here's Felicitas birthing a daughter and herself becoming a new child of God. It's like having a birthday the next day herself. It's just ...
Timothy George:	Wonderful.
Lynn Cohick:	There is a lot of rich theology quite frankly in this narrative. So I think that's why this story has so captivated the church and they celebrate. They celebrated their martyrdom. Augustine, we have a couple of his sermons where he preaches on their birthday at the church. They were held up as model believers for their testimony.
Timothy George:	So their birthday was their death day. It was their execution day, but it was their entrance into heavenly life with God and so it's a cause of celebration and remembrance. It's wonderful. We're almost out of time, Lynn, but I wanted to ask you if you would say just a brief word about one of the chapters you've written in this book, "Christian Women in Catacomb Art." We've been talking about documents and diaries and stories, but say a little bit about the catacombs and what we can learn about women from the art we see there.
Lynn Cohick:	Yes. I think the fascinating thing for me is one, how difficult it is to read art, so we don't want to jump to conclusions about what is being said there, but the other thing is how much a part women were, how much they were a part of their family life. So catacombs were burial places. They weren't where Christians hid from persecution or anything. These were burial and pagans also had catacombs where they buried their dead. Jews had catacombs. 
	It wasn't simply Christians that did this, but their artwork, a lot of it focused on table fellowship, where you had men and women around a table, I think as a way to think about what the next life will be in that fellowship with the Lord. We talk about the marriage supper of the lamb. I don't want to say that the images on the catacombs directly reflect that, but you just get a sense of family. It showed kind of the daily life in one of those most poignant moments that all families face, the death of a loved one. 
	You saw how women and men together worshiped and testified to their beliefs in the resurrection. I think that it, yeah, it normalized for me the presence of women in all areas of the church. That's really I think what our book highlights, is women are just there. They're just there in all of the things that are happening, and influential and making decisions and those decisions affect, eventually how the liturgy and the creeds and all of that come to be.
Timothy George:	I've been speaking today on the Beeson Podcast with Dr. Lynn Cohick. She is the author with Amy Brown Hughes of a wonderful new book, "Christian Women in the Patristic World." It's published by Baker Academic. I recommend it highly to you who are interested in Christian history, the history of women in the church. It's a beautifully produced book and very readable and very interesting. Thank you so much Lynn for this conversation today.
Lynn Cohick:	Thank you so much for inviting me. I had a great time chatting with you.
Announcer:	You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school, training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work, and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson Podcast.