Female gossipers and their reputation in the Pastoral Epistles

Abstract

The young widows in 1 Timothy 5 are required not to be gossips and busybodies, and to watch their reputation. I will suggest that the author here downloads a misogynic ligtoposl/ig from his contemporary cultural encyclopedia connecting women to gossip in a twofold way: 1) there are strong tendencies in ancient literature to draw caricatures of women's speech; and 2) a woman was also responsible for behaving in a way that did not generate gossip about her. Instead of searching for 'the opponents' in the Pastoral Epistles, I read the letters' rhetoric as a way of turning 'those who are different' into opponents. The widows are to be found among them. The main task of these letters is to limit those others' influence, through 'othering' them in various ways. One of the author's means is to use gendered power language, where women are connected to gossip. The letters can not be read as historical sources giving us direct access to Early Christian 'reality, ' but have to be read within the framework of a hermeneutic of suspicion.

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