Gendered Couplets in Q and Legal Formulations: From Rhetoric to Social History‪.‬

Feminist rereadings of the NT and early Christian literature have served both to expose the androcentric bias of the majority of historical research into the origins of Christianity and to direct our attention to a series of phenomena that might otherwise have escaped notice. Women have been systematically effaced from the historical record by androcentric source materials and by androcentric historical readings of those sources. (1) An awareness of this marginalization (both de facto and discursive) of women has prompted a reexamination of the historical record for whatever traces might remain, either of women themselves or of their effacement. Such an interest in the position of women in earliest Christianity and in its environment is paralleled by and resonant with a current turn toward social description and sociological analysis of early Christianity. The trend is nowhere more evident than in recent studies of Q. (2) The combination of these two interests has in recent years yielded a series of studies on Q's theological understanding of and regard for women; (3) on the presence of women among the addressees of Q; (4) on the presence of women among the purveyors and/or composers of Q, and the possibility of female itinerants; (5) and a number of more specific studies of various gender-related phenomena pertinent to Q. (6) I wish here to address a rather specific literary phenomenon that I believe may hold out some promise for an understanding of several dimensions of gender in the text--and, indeed, the social history--of Q. This feature, which has received scant attention even among feminist analysts of Q, is the phenomenon of gendered doublets, that is, repetitious examples, statements, or arguments, paired by gender: one male, one female (usually in that order). To the best of my knowledge, the only explicit and comprehensive attention this tendency has received has been in Alicia Batten's 1994 article in BTB. (7) Others, however, have commented on individual examples of the characteristic phenomenon. (8) My analysis of these units of Q will suggest that the phenomenon is more indicative of a penchant for legal and regulatory formulations than it is of an interest in a deliberate critique of patriarchy. This conclusion, in turn, has tangible implications for a social description of the people responsible for Q.