Abstract
The earliest Christians – all of whom were Jews – spoke of the Holy Spirit as a feminine figure. The present article discusses the main proof texts, ranging from the ‘Gospel according to the Hebrews’ to a number of testimonies from the second century. The ancient tradition was, in particular, kept alive in East and West Syria, up to and including the fourth century Makarios and/or Symeon, who even influenced ‘modern’ Protestants such as John Wesley and the Moravian leader Count von Zinzendorf. It is concluded that, in the image of the Holy Spirit as woman and mother, one may attain a better appreciation of the fullness of the Divine.
Highlights
In two previous articles, I discussed the place and role of both the doctrine and the experience of the Holy Spirit in the Early Church (Van Oort 2011; 2012)
The church father Jerome (c. 342–420), who spent many years in Bethlehem, makes mention of several passages from the Gospel of the Hebrews, too. In his Commentary on Micah, he says:. He should believe in the Gospel, which has been edited according to the Hebrews, which we have translated recently, in which it is said of the person of the Saviour: ‘mother (tamaay) (...) but (My) Mother, the Holy Spirit, took me just by one of my hairs ....’ (Jerome, Commentary on Micah 2, 7, 6 – Adriaen 1969:513)
While Jerome was well acquainted with the old Jewish Christian tradition of the femininity of the Holy Spirit, which in his time was still alive among the ‘Nazaraeans’, who read the ‘Gospel according to the Hebrews’, he considered it to be a question of language only
Summary
I discussed the place and role of both the doctrine and the experience of the Holy Spirit in the Early Church (Van Oort 2011; 2012). Apart from several other things, we learn from this quote that, sometime in the beginning of the second century CE, the Jewish Christians of this Gospel spoke of the Holy Spirit as Mother (mētēr).
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