Abstract
It would be hard to find someone to dispute the statement that all people desire to be happy. Beyond that, the disagreement begins. Thomas Aquinas tells us that “to desire happiness is nothing else than to desire that one’s will be satisfied”1—but psychiatrists and psychologists cannot agree on what satisfies our will. Ancient philosophers also disagreed about the substance of happiness. Plato held that union with the One would bring happiness, while Epicureans argued that the balanced life brought happiness. Stoics said it was the acquisition of virtue, and so on.
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Notes
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, tr. Fathers of English Dominican Province (Repr.; Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981), PI-II, q. 5, art. 8.
Raymond E. Brown claims that there is no precedence in Hebrew or Greek for a son calling his mother woman, and therefore, its symbolic significance must be acknowledged. The choice is certainly relevant to feminist exegetes pondering Jesus’ attitudes toward women. See Raymond E. Brown, tr., The Gospel According to John 1–12, vol. 29: The Anchor Bible, ed. William F. Albright and David N. Freedman (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1966), 99;
see also Bruce Vawter, “The Gospel According to John,” in JBC, 63:60; Navarre Bible: Saint John’s Gospel, tr. B. McCarthy (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1987), 38–39; and Gary M. Burge, “John,” Evangelical Commentary on the Bible, ed. Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1989), 849. Each time a woman plays a key role in revealing Jesus’ meaning about salvation, he uses the term “woman ” to address her, even when he already knows her name.
Cf. also Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her (New York: Crossroad, 1984), 327.
It is difficult to determine how many individual women the gospels are referring to. See Michael Fallon, The Winston Commentary on the Gospels (Minneapolis, MN: Winston Press, 1980), 426.
Cf. Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Har-court Brace and Company, 1993).
The verse was not as central to Hebrew thought. See discussion in Patricia Ranft, Women and Spiritual Equality in Christian Tradition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 2–9; and 37–41.
See also Douglas Hall, Imaging God (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1986), 19–20.
Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 9, 26, 54, respectively.
The noun martus and its derivations are found over two hundred times in the New Testament, primarily in John (eighty-three times) and Acts (thirty-nine times). Cf. Allison A. Trites’s definitive work on witness, The Concept of Witness in New Testament Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977),
and Patricia Ranft, “The Concept of Witness to the Christian Tradition from Its Origin to Its Institutionalization,” Revue bénédictine 102:1–2 (1992), 9–23.
Cf. Allison A. Trites, “Martus and Martydom in the Apocalypse: A Semantic Study,” Novum Testamentum 15:1 (January 1973), 72–80, for the history of the diachronistic semantic change of martus from witness to martyr.
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© 2000 Patricia Ranft
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Ranft, P. (2000). Early Christianity. In: A Woman’s Way. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-38533-1_2
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