From: Bart Ehrman (behrman@email.unc.edu)
Date: Thu Dec 02 1999 - 19:19:28 EST
No, don't think you're missing anything. 1 Clement clearly uses
masculine gendered language for God, and to that extent thought of him as
male. Whether he imagined him as having genetalia is another issue, one,
I'm afraid, we have no way of resolving.
I should point out though that biblical writers also imagined God to be
male, but also had no difficulty imagining him as a chicken (protective
wings, e.g.), so the idea of having a mixed metaphor wouldn't be all that
peculiar. In other words, just because 1 Clement normally refers to God
in masculine language, that doesn't mean that he could not conceive of him
as having a baby. Hence a return to the question of how to translate
gennaw without assuming that he coudn't have meant "given you birth."
-- Bart Ehrman
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
On Thu, 2 Dec 1999, Kevin L. Barney wrote:
> Why are we so certain that gender was irrelevant to Clement? Are we basing
> this on later Christian theology (or current political correctness)? It
> seems to me that there are two problems here. First, since the meaning of
> GENNAW varies depending on whether the subject is a man or a woman, we have
> to ask what gender, if any, Clement perceived God to be. Since in the NT
> God is called "father", and even later is called the gennetor to Christ's
> gennema, I don't see how we can just assume that Clement thought of God as
> genderless (unless of course there is something in his writings to suggest
> that). If Clement thought of God in male terms, then we come to the second
> problem of choosing a good English word to represent GENNAW (fathered,
> begat, begotten, sired, generated, procreated or whatever).
>
> Am I missing something here?
>
> Kevin L. Barney
> Hoffman Estates, Illinois
> klbarney@yahoo.com
>
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