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Women priests - is there a rational argument against it?
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Detail of Leonardo da Vinci's 'Last Supper' possibly showing Mary
Magdalene seated next to Christ Source - WikiMedia Commons
One of my more vociferous readers was upset that I wrote the phrase, 'the lie that there were no female apostles' and went on to say in my article that there is no logical reason why females cannot be Catholic priests.
You can see the article in question here:
Was-Mary-Magdalene-ever-a-prostitute
The reader, nicknamed Magdalene wrote in a comment (sic),
the Church does not lie There were no women at the Last Supper where the 12 hand picked disciples gathtered with Jesus for the Passover. Jesus cured on the sabbath He was not afraid to defy convention and if he was married the gospel writers would have mentionned this fact in any case Christ's Divinity would have precluded marriage.The Church has no female priests because to date it is clear that the male priesthood is the way God wants things to be. If Jesus had wanted female priests His mother would have been present at the Last Supper .If God ever wishes to change this situation he will raise up some great saints to send this message In the meantime we live in holy obedience as His mother advised the servants at the wedding feast of Cana "DO as He tells you"
His mother was born immaculate and she bore Jesus by the power of the Spirit and Joseph continued as a chaste protector of the holy family.
Magdalene is valiant and repentant.
I appreciate all of my readers, and have no desire to offend them. The word, 'lie' may have been too strong, and I apologize for using it. As for the assertation that it is not whether Jesus had female apostles and/or disciples, but the gender of those included at the last supper that dictates who can be a priest, I have to disagree.
As Bart D. Ehrman points out in his fascinating book, Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them), the details of the death of Jesus and the Last Supper in the canonical (accepted) gospels vary widely according to which gospel is read. Ehrman writes,
In Mark 14:12, the disciples ask Jesus where they are to prepare the Passover meal for that evening. In other words, this is on the Day of Preparation for Passover.
(the ancient Jews believe that the new day began at Sunset)
Jesus gives them instructions. They make the preparations, and when it is evening - the beginning of Passover day -they have the meal. It is a special meal indeed. Jesus takes the symbolic foods fo the Passover and imbues them with yet more symbolic meaning. He takes the unleavened bread, breaks it, and says,
This is my body.By implication, his body must be broken for salvation. Then after supper he takes the cup of wine and says,
This is my blood of the covenant, that is poured out for many.(Mark 14:22-25)
In Mark's version of this story, Jesus is arrested that evening, spends the night in jail and is crucified the next morning at nine o' clock. The Last Supper is the Passover meal, and Jesus dies on the morning after the Passover meal.
About John's version of the same events, Ehrman writes,
But it is striking that in John, at the beginning of the account, in contrast to Mark, the disciples do not ask Jesus where they are "to prepare the Passover." Consequently, he gives them no instructions for preparing the meal. They do eat a final supper together, but in John, Jesus says nothing about the bread being his body or the cup representing his blood. Instead he washes the disciples' feet, a story found in none of the other Gospels (John 13:1-20).
After the meal, Jesus is betrayed by Judas, spends the night in jail and is crucified. As Ehrman points out, John 19:14 says of the time and date of the condemnation of Jesus by Pilate,
And it was the preparation of the passover, and about the sixth hour: and he (Pilate) saith unto the Jews, Behold your King!
So John's gospel describes Jesus dying on the day before Passover, and the 'sixth hour' would be noon on the day of preparation for the Passover meal.
Ehrman points out that John's is the only gospel that says that Jesus is 'the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.' He makes a brilliant case for the idea that John, in order to emphasize this point, wanted Jesus to die not on Passover, but on the day when the lambs are slaughtered for Passover in the Jewish Temple. Ehrman also runs through every possible way that one could try to explain away the discrepancies in these two accounts and force them to reconcile with one another, then he debunks each one.
Mr. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a well respected biblical scholar who entered the seminary as a Fundamentalist Christian, believing in the inerrancy of the Bible. But, through scholarship, he was eventually forced to admit that the Bible is full of revisions, mis-translations and contradictions.
What does all this have to do with Mary Magdalene and the topic of women priests? It seems to this would-be biblical scholar that, if the authors of the canonical New Testament could not agree about the date of the Last Supper, nor the exact symbolic point of it (bread and wine as body and blood, or sacrificial lamb slain before the Passover), how can we be sure that any mention of a woman present was not deleted? Answer: we can't.
Da Vinci agreed it seems. Despite attempts by many to explain away the extremely feminine appearance of the disciple next to Jesus in his painting, 'The Last Supper,' the figure seated at Christ's right continues to strike most viewers as a woman.
For more information about Bart Ehrman's Jesus Interrupted, you can go here:
www.amazon.com/Jesus-Interrupted-Revealing-Hidden-Contradictions/dp/0061173932
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