ext_44983 ([identity profile] sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] sophiaserpentia 2004-05-27 06:11 am (UTC)

I'm not sure I agree. The Jewish tradition is partite as opposed to dualistic, but Paul I think crosses the line into dualism. He describes flesh as "corrupt" and spirit as "incorrupt," and shows what I would call a nearly pathological mistrust of pleasure, especially sexual pleasure. In I Corinthians 7 he made that view clear, describing even sexual pleasure within a marriage as of marginal acceptability. He would prefer, he wrote several times, that even within a marriage that Christians remain celibate.

It's not clear that Jesus bore the same mistrust of physical pleasure. But even so, it's clear from reading a lot of the early Christian literature (I'm referring not to Gnostic works but to orthodox texts like "The Acts of Paul and Thecla" and "The Passion of Felicity and Perpetua") that sex was hated so much that even femininity was seen with mistrust.

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