© The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Vol. 18(3): 341–355 DOI: 10.1177/0966735009360432 Becoming Men, Staying Women: Gender Ambivalence in Christian Apocryphal Texts and Contexts 1 Blossom Stefaniw blossomstefaniw@aol.com AbstrAct The motif of women becoming men, taking on manly characteristics, or being made male appears in several Christian Apocryphal texts. This essay investigates the reasons behind this motif in terms of the cultural context without evaluating whether the attitude towards women which this par- ticular motif might be understood to relect demonstrates that Christian communities were more or less misogynistic than the rest of society. The ‘becoming male’ motif can reasonably be expected, because of its oddity relative to modern views of gender and its distinctly late-antique roots, to help to reveal the relevant social and cultural assumptions about the relationship between gender and spiritual authority which lie behind its appearance in Apocryphal texts. These assumptions in turn explain why the motif is one of ambivalence rather than equality or neutralization. Keywords: Apocrypha, early Christianity, gender-ambivalence, late antiquity Introduction: Interpretive Issues The task of explaining the motif of gender-ambivalence in the Apocrypha is a daunting one, not least because it so easily diverts one to an attempt at evaluating attitudes to the place and worth of women relected in the Apocrypha. The need to avoid trying to assess this particular milieu’s attitude toward women is due in part to the diverse types of texts included in the Apocrypha, and also to the basic dificulty of determining the content of any given ‘attitude toward women’, let alone that of unknown writers or purveyors of oral traditions in a culture and setting very distinct 1. This title is a play on the title of Greg Woolf’s well-known article, ‘Becoming Roman, Staying Greek: Culture, Identity and the Civilising Process in the Roman East’; Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 40 (1994): 116–43. at UNIVERSITAETSBIBLIOTHEK MAINZ on June 9, 2015 fth.sagepub.com Downloaded from