A Feminist Interpretation of Christian Scriptures and the Modern Feminist Christian Sermon
In the article, the possibility of creating a set of new feminist meanings when reading the texts of the Old and New Testaments and of using the corpus of these new meanings in academic Christian theology and liturgical practice is studied. The research methodology includes techniques of comparative linguistic analysis, hermeneutic analysis, historical and contextual analysis. The object of the research is a number of sacred texts of the Masoretic Tanakh and the New Testament (The 1550 Stephanus Textus Receptus). The research is focused on the gender specificity of names (addresses, designations, self-names, titles) of God the Father and the character of Apostolic Evangelical record of the speech of Jesus Christ. At present, within feminist discourse, we can find an obvious criticism of traditional translations of the Bible which are deemed to be patriarchal, creating and reproducing anti-feminist meanings, discriminating women and representatives of other oppressed social groups, for example, on national, racial, ethnic, sexual and other grounds. Feminist thinkers made attempts to rethink the language of the written texts of the Bible with the aim of discovering the true divine message to people which is believed to have been shaded by patriarchal language consciously or unconsciously used by male authors of the Scriptures. This article examines the validity of feminist claims in the field of revising traditional theological concepts within the Old and New Testament narratives. First, the names and self-names of God are analysed in the original Masoretic texts of the Old Testament of the Bible. The grammatical features and rules of grammatical coordination of nouns, adjectives, verbal forms, including participial and perfect forms, as well as pronouns related to God in the Hebrew Masoretic text of the Bible are studied. Second, the problem of linguistic conveyance by the authors of the canonical Gospels of Christ's speech in His conversations and sermons is investigated. The author concludes that feminist discourse, however useful it may be to achieve gender egalitarianism in the modern society, cannot justify the truth of linguistic re-interpretation of the basic, key concepts of Christian theology related to the nature and properties of God, as well as the nature of the transmission of the Messiah's speech by His disciples in Gospel narrations. We cannot speak of God as a Mother in heaven or a Divine gender couple. Likewise, we cannot accept the view that there was a group of female apostles who were pushed away by male apostles from the administration of the Church and whose existence was concealed from the descendants by male Christ's disciples with the use of linguistic means. In the author's opinion, the artificial fem-inisation of the Bible text cannot be regarded as a legitimate linguistic-theological concept, but it is useful for our understanding names of God and the character of Jesus Christ's sermon.
Keywords
feminism,
Jesus Christ sermon,
Bible,
Tanakh,
Masoretic text,
linguistic description of God,
gender,
gender-inclusive Bible,
God's names,
феминизм,
проповедь Иисуса Христа,
Библия,
Танах,
масоретский текст,
лингвистическое описание Бога,
имена Бога,
гендер,
гендерно-инклюзивная БиблияAuthors
| Sharov Konstantin S. | Lomonosov Moscow State University | const.sharov@mail.ru |
Всего: 1
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